SOURCE: Ty, Eleanor. “Female Philosophy Refunctioned: Elizabeth Hamilton's Parodic Novel.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 22, no. 4 (October 1991): 111-29.

In the following essay, Ty maintains that Hamilton's parodic reproduction of liberal texts in her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers provides ironic support for the very philosophies that the work overtly condemns.

During the 1790s, a number of English women writers used the novel as a means of conveying their endorsement or disapproval of the ideals of liberty, equality, and the “rights of woman,” the rallying cry of many female supporters of the French Revolution of 1789. Among the most notable of these early “feminists”¹ are Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, who both wrote essays and tracts, as well as fiction, to argue for a better system of education for young girls, for providing employment opportunities for single women, and more generally for regarding the female sex as rational and...