Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life-Writing

Abstract

Chapter Four examines women’s life-writing and the formation of an “erotic imagination” within life-writing as a genre. It begins by examining the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), one of the most influential works of Methodist life-writing, and reads it as against her earlier manuscript versions of the work. This reading reveals some of the ways and reasons Methodist women navigated different publication platforms and life-writing genres (private diary, semi-public scribal publication, print publication) in order to reach different audiences. Specifically, it examines Rogers’ status as a Methodist “mystic” who, in her diaries and manuscript works, represents a deeply erotic female mysticism that is edited out of her print publications. The chapter then turns to Rogers’ contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, to consider how both women use the life-writing genre to re-write the terms and conditions of female desire while textually re-orienting this desire away from the male gaze.