Library of 'The First English Feminist' found

[ErrolTheDragon]

I'd never heard of Mary Astell, so someone new to read about on IWD perhaps.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mary-astell-pioneering-feminists-library-unearthed-at-cambridge-university-h7dvlcfvx?shareToken=2332dccb25c61bc4077e00ab1cc5d6ff

There's a leader column piece too:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-times-view-on-mary-astell-first-feminist-p8325s9d9?shareToken=b988bd23e7839c8c4d0f966d5dc69e79

This is a wonderful story. I had forgotten about Mary Astell but did read about her years ago. She was an incredible woman
In Reflections Upon Marriage (1700), she warned female readers that to accept a proposal was to “elect a monarch for life”. Love this

Melvin Bragg's In Our Time did a programme on her and I might still be available.

Amazing - naughty her for writing in the margins of books though :)

Making marginal notes in your own books is a good thing IMO, as well as useful to later scholars as this shows.

This is great..... I love the aside that they don't know how they remained undiscovered for so long.... it might - just might - have something to do with the fact that Magdalen Cambridge was one of the last colleges to go mixed sex, so was a bastion of men until very recently

Yes, I thought that... yeah, what a puzzler. I'm imagining a storeroom something like in the raiders of the lost ark.

I've linked to the IOT podcast on my Library dashboard.
Thanks OP!

Thanks for sharing this ErrolTheDragon! I am looking forward to reading it later this evening. I recently bought a book called “Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England” in order to learn more about Mary Astell.

I really enjoyed the In Our Time episode on her too.

Oh this is a treat! Thanks OP & thanks highame for the In Our Time tip. I've bookmarked for later:

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000nzpf

Dale Spender wrote a chapter about Mary Astell in her magnificent book "Women of Ideas and what men have done to them".

www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Ideas-What-Have-Done/dp/0044408323?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

This is great. So it had been rumoured the collection was left to magdelene Oxford, but handwriting shows these are her books at magdelene Cambridge. What an amazing find.
Mary Astell should be more well known. When you think how early she was.

Thank you so much that is awesome!