Special Collections
Book of the Month, April 2006
Letters to a Young Lady
Jane West
London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806
[S.L.] I [West – 1806]
The didactic novelist, poet and playwright Jane West (1758-1852) has been largely neglected in the twentieth century, omitted from the Oxford Companion to English Literature, the Dictionary of Literary Biography and the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Her contribution to literary history, however, includes the fact that her novel A Gossip’s Story (1796) is a precursor of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, contrasting girls who embody these qualities and preferring sense. West believed that the time spent writing was justifiable because of its moral aims, and her works express a conservative view of women’s role in society.
West states in her preface to Letters to a Young Lady, dedicated to Queen Charlotte, that she undertook the work about the duties and character of women on request, following the popularity of her Letters to a Young Man (1801). West’s subjects range from the change of manners in the middle classes to religious knowledge and the peculiar notion of Calvin to the duties more especially feminine; celibacy, love and marriage; our duty to servants and inferiors; and the duties of declining life and old age. Like Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) albeit from a different perspective (duties versus rights) and for different ends, West participated through the text to the debate on the ‘Woman's question’ and foregrounded the necessity of improved education for women.
Letters to a Young Lady ran through two editions in 1806, the first year of its publication. The third edition appeared in 1811, with a long interval before subsequent American editions of 1851, 1968 and 1974 and, most recently, a 1996 facsimile of the 1811 edition in the series “Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment”.
This copy of the first edition was purchased from Quaritch in December, 2005. It complements four of West’s novels in the Sterling Library, A Gossip’s Story (1804 edition), A Tale of the Times (1799), The Refusal (1810) and The Loyalists (1812).
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