Clare Brant
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 269-282

This essay discusses the anonymous 1775 novel, The General Election: A Series of Letters Chiefly Between Two Female Friends, and emphasizes the impact of women’s letters on party politics. Typically, scholars interpret the eighteenth-century epistolary form as emblematizing the female, private sphere of sentiment, but this essay uncovers significant political activism in The General Election’s letter-writing women. Further, it surmises that the gender of the novel’s unknown author is female because the novel so admirably demonstrates the impact of female voices upon the outcome of an important election. Regardless of the accuracy of this hypothesis, this analysis reflects an important trend in women’s political writings: the attempt to integrate female modes, whether genres or social roles, into the political mainstream.