Women without Men: Barbara Hofland and the Economics of Widowhood
Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska
Volume 17, no. 3, April 2005
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
“The widow of a Gentleman of the rank of major, in His Majesty’s service, is left with Seven Children without any means of support, unless by the assistance of the public a sum can be raised to enable her to continue an engagement to which she has been introduced, and which affords a reasonable prospect of a provision for her family … Subscriptions for the above benevolent purpose will be received at the following Bankers” … The appeal that appeared in the World in the spring of 1790 was unusual only in that its presence in a London paper offered the widow a relatively uncommon public advantage in securing funds to help her and her family cope with her widowhood. Widowhood itself was anything but uncommon at the time, and the dire straits hinted at in this single notice were familiar to countless women … Three early novels by Barbara Hofland (1770–1844) — The History of an Officer’s Widow and Her Young Family (1809), The History of a Clergyman’s Widow and Her Young Family (1812), and The Merchant’s Widow and Her Young Family (1814) — reveal how this socially committed Sheffield author used the vehicle of popular fiction to present an alternative to the familiar dilemma of indigent widowhood. These novels are thus important both for their picture of Hofland’s socioeconomic ideology of the family and for their modelling of an early feminist alternative to familiar patterns of suffering and failure.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Family” include:
“If a man dared act for himself”: Family Romance and Independence in Frances Burney’s Cecilia
by MEGAN WOODWORTH (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
Tristram Shandy, Boyhood, and Breeching
by CHANTEL LAVOIE (ECF 28.1, Fall 2015)
Historicizing Domestic Relations: Sarah Scott’s Use of the “Household Family”
by ANN VAN SANT (ECF 17.3, April 2005)
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