The Unsex’d Females: a Poem,

£5,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Fairly common institutionally but rare in commerce: the last copy recorded on Rare Book Hub was in a group lot of titles by Polwhele at Sotheby’s in 1966 and before that at Sotheby’s in 1917. An American edition was published in New York in 1800. A facsimile (with an introduction by Gina Lurie) was published in 1974. A remarkably savage poem (with highly detailed supplementary notes),“concerning the essential nature and societal role of women” ( ODNB ) by pitching Mary Wollstonecraft’s supposed radical feminism against the “genius and literary attainments” of Hannah More and her fellow Bluestockings. Polwhele’s poem takes inspiration from Thomas James Mathias’s poem The Pursuits of Literature (first published 1794) which attacked various contemporary literary figures including (as Polwhele quotes on the title-page of this work): “Our unsex’d female writers [who] now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves in the labyrinth of politics, or turn us wild with Gallic frenzy…” Polwhele begins his own tirade by attacking women primarily for their appearance and interest in fashion: “Survey with me, what ne’er our fathers saw, A female band despising NATURE’S law, As ‘proud defiance’ flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms. I shudder at the new unpictur’d scene, Where unsex’d woman vaunts the imperious mien; Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart, Invoke the Proteus of petrific art; With equal ease, in body or in mind, To Gallic freaks or Gallic f

• Year: 1798

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