Studying Forms and Functions of Plurilingualism in Eighteenth-Century European Women’s Letters: The Case of Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806)

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the plurilingual writing practices of eighteenth-century women of letters through the case of Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), a plurilingual poet and translator who mastered no less than ten different languages. To determine the forms and functions of plurilingualism in early modern women’s letters, this article puts forward a methodological framework which combines insights from different fields of study. This framework moves beyond the notion of code-switching, and argues for a distinction between manifest and latent forms of epistolary plurilingualism. To determine the functions of plurilingualism in women’s letters, it proposes a contextualised reading. The potential of this framework is then illustrated by a close analysis of Elizabeth Carter’s plurilingual correspondence with Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). From this analysis, it appears that during the early years of their correspondence, Carter’s use of plurilingualism was inspired by an awareness of the inherent differences between languages, and of the dynamic interplay between language and identity. Studying the plurilingual dimensions of eighteenth-century women’s letters thus not only sheds new light upon women’s linguistic capabilities, but it also gives more insight into the way in which early modern women (re)shaped their intellectual and/or literary self/ves through letter writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Elizabeth Carter
• epistolary plurilingualism
• literary multilingualism
• self-representation
• women writers
• eighteenth century

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) through a doctoral fellowship grant (grant number: 1119024N). I am indebted to Beatrijs Vanacker for her invaluable comments and suggestions. Many thanks are also due to Mónica Bolufer, Lieven D’hulst, Anke Gilleir and Lieke van Deinsen for their relevant questions and support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thomas Birch, “Art. XXI”, History of the Works of the Learned (1 June 1739), p. 392.

2 Ibid.

3 Following Olga Anokhina and Emilio Sciarrino, I make a distinction between the notions of plurilingualism and multilingualism. Multilingualism refers to the co-existence of several languages or language varieties in a given territory or nation. By plurilingualism, I understand the simultaneous knowledge of different languages or language varieties by a given person. A plurilingual writer is a person who uses more than one language or variety during his/her writing process. Texts that result from such plurilingual writing processes are, as a consequence, plurilingual texts. It should, however, also be noted that there is, in fact, little consensus on terminology in the relatively young field of literary multilingualism studies, as illustrated by Juliette Taylor-Batty and Till Dembeck in the introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Literary Multilingualism. See Olga Anokhina and Emilio Sciarrino, “Plurilinguisme littéraire : de la théorie à la genèse”, Genesis, 46 (2018): 14; Juliette Taylor-Batty and Till Dembeck, “Introduction”, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, 1 (2023): 10–11.

4 Birch, “Art. XXI”.

5 Amélie Jaques and Beatrijs Vanacker, “Language, Gender and Authority in the Letters of Isabelle de Charrière”, Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth Century: Women across Borders, ed. M. Bolufer, L. Guinot and C. Blutrach (Palgrave, 2024), pp. 171–90.

6 See also Anke Gilleir, Alicia Montoya, Suzan van Dijk, Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back (Brill, 2010).

7 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (Routledge, 1997).

8 Gillian Dow, Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700–1900 (Peter Lang, 2007); Julie C. Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (Stanford University Press, 2009); Angela Sanmann-Graf, Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère and Valérie Cossy, Fémin(in)visible. Women Authors of the Enlightenment (Cahiers du centre de traduction littéraire de Lausanne, no. 58, 2018).

9 See also Marie-Pascale Pieretti, “Women Writers and Translation in Eighteenth-Century France”, French Review, 75.3 (2002): 474–88; Mirella Agorni, “A Marginal(ized) Perspective on Translation History: Women and Translation in the Eighteenth Century”, Meta, 50.3 (2005): 817–830; Caroline Bland and Hilary Brown, “Introduction: Women as Cultural Mediators and Translators”, Oxford German Studies, 42.2 (2013): 111–18; Lieke van Deinsen and Beatrijs Vanacker, “Found through Translation: Female Translators and the Construction of ‘Relational Authority’ in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic”, Early Modern Low Countries, 3.1 (2019): 60–80; Angela Sanmann-Graf, Die andere Kreativität: Übersetzerinnen im 18. Jahrhundert und die Problematik weiblicher Autorschaft (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2021).

10 It is Steven Kellman who first developed the notion of translingualism, which he defined as “writing in more than one language or in a language other than one’s native tongue”. See Steven G. Kellman, Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (Purdue University Press, 2020), p. vii. In her article, Marília Jöhnk uses the notion of translingualism as a synonym for literary multilingualism, and she even sees translation as a form of translingual writing. Marília Jöhnk, “Literary Multilingualism and Women’s Writing in 19^th Century Europe”, Hidden Multilingualism in 19^th-Century European Literature, ed. J.-K. Mende (De Gruyter, 2023), p. 242.

11 Jöhnk, “Literary Multilingualism and Women’s Writing”.

12 The notion of exophonic writing is often used as a synonym for translingualism. Jönk also understands exophonic writing as a form of writing whereby the author chooses to write in a language other than his/her primary one. See ibid.

13 Pioneers in the field of literary multilingualism studies were Leonard Forster, The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1970); Rainier Grutman, Des langues qui résonnent : l’hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois (Fides-CÉTUQ); and Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). The field really started to develop around 2010 with studies by Yasmin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: the Postmonolingual Condition (Fordham University Press, 2012); and David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Most of these studies were, however, concerned with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More recently, scholars have started to show interest in historical forms of literary plurilingualism. With regards to the eighteenth-century, the following issue, edited by Beatrijs Vanacker, Lieke van Deinsen, Tom Verschaffel and Rik Vosters, is worth mentioning: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 139.2/3 (2023): 119–281.

14 Arja Nurmi and Païvi Pahta, “Multilingual Practices in Women’s English Correspondence 1400–1800”, Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse, ed. M. Sebba, S. Mahootian and C. Jonsson (Routledge, 2012), p. 48. Even though there was a marked rise in the number of women whose correspondences contained examples of code-switching, men’s correspondences showed significantly more examples of code-switching at the time. See ibid., p. 50.

15 The selection of languages that Nurmi and Pahta found in women’s letters is significantly narrower than the selection found in men’s letters. Nurmi and Pahta suggested that this is due to women’s limited access to education during the long eighteenth century. See ibid., p. 52, p. 63.

16 Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, “Belle de Zuylen’s English”, Cahiers Isabelle de Charrière, 10, special issue: Isabelle de Charrière dans son contexte européen (2015), pp. 8–31.

17 Nurmi and Pahta, “Multilingual Practices in Women’s English Correspondence”, p. 64.

18 Nancy Isenberg, “Seduction, Introspection, Experimentation. The Epistolary Code Switching of Giustiniana Wynne”, French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern Age, ed. M. Van Strien-Chardonneau and M.-C. Kok-Escalle (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 117.

19 This framework can also be used to study the forms and functions of epistolary plurilingualism in the letters of eighteenth-century male writers, which show similar tendencies. It is also important to note that the use of plurilingualism in letter writing was not limited to the eighteenth century. To give an example, during the seventeenth century, polyglots such as Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) and Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) regularly switched languages within their letters. This framework can also be applied to examine the letters of eighteenth-century (women) writers’ precursors and successors.

20 Giulia Radaelli, Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit: Sprachwechsel bei Elias Canetti und Ingeborg Bachmann (Akademie Verlag, 2011), p. 53. The distinction between manifest and latent forms of plurilingualism has also been discussed by Till Dembeck and Rolf Parr, Literatur und Mehrsprachigkeit: ein Handbuch (Narr Francke Attempto, 2017), p. 10; Grutman, Des langues qui résonnent, p. 38.

21 Radaelli, Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit, pp. 61–67.

22 Some of these Latin letters have appeared in Gwen Hampshire, Elizabeth Carter, 1717–1806: An Edition of Some Unpublished Letters (University of Delaware Press, 2005).

23 The unpublished diary of Thomas Birch gives a detailed overview of his plurilingual correspondence with Elizabeth Carter. It appears that thirty-four letters were written in Latin, thirteen in English, and one in French. For an analysis of the epistolary relationship between Carter and Birch, see Edward Ruhe, “Birch, Johnson, and Elizabeth Carter: An Episode of 1738–39”, PMLA, 73.5 (1958): 491–500.

24 See, for example, the letter from Carter to Birch, 22 August 1738, printed in Hampshire, Elizabeth Carter, pp. 48–49.

25 See, for example, the letter from Talbot to Carter, 3 April 1750, in Montagu Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter […] (Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, 1807), p. 335.

26 See, for instance, the letter from Luise Gottsched to Johann Christoph Gottsched, 10 November 1734, in Luise Gottsched, “Mit der Feder in der Hand”: Briefe aus den Jahren 1730–1762, ed. Inka Kording (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), p. 80.

27 Carter to Talbot, 22 August 1763, in Pennington, Memoirs, p. 223.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Agorni, “A Marginal(ized) Perspective on Translation History”.

31 Ibid., p. 824.

32 Carter to Talbot, 31 July 1763, in Pennington, Memoirs, p. 209.

33 Brigitte Diaz, L’épistolaire, ou, La pensée nomade : formes et fonctions de la correspondance dans quelques parcours d’écrivains au XIXe siècle (Presses universitaires de France, 2002), pp. 41–42.

34 Ibid., p. 68. My translation.

35 Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait français (Fallois, 2001).

36 Latin continued to play an important role during the eighteenth century. See Floris Verhaart and Laurence Brockliss, The Latin Language and the Enlightenment (Liverpool University Press, 2023).

37 Willem Frijhoff and Vladislav Rjéoutski, Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe: Education, Sociability, and Governance (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). See also Karen Bennet and Angelo Cattaneo, Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period (Routledge, 2022).

38 Gilles Siouffi, “De l’‘universalité’ européenne du français au XVIIIe siècle : retour sur les représentations et les réalités”, Langue française, 167.3 (2010): p. 14.

39 On the emergence of linguistic nationalism, see, for instance, Joep Leerssen, National Thought in Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Gijsbert J. Rutten, Language Planning as Nation Building: Ideology, Policy and Implementation in the Netherlands, 1750–1850 (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2019).

40 Diaz, L’épistolaire, ou, La pensée nomade, p. 162.

41 Armel Dubois-Nayt, Marie-Élisabeth Henneau and Rotraud von Kulessa, Revisiter la « Querelle des femmes » : discours sur l’égalité-inégalité des sexes, de 1400 aux lendemains de la Révolution (Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2015).

42 Brigitte Diaz, “Avant-propos”, Épistolaire au féminin, ed. B. Diaz and J. Siess (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2006), p. 10. My translation.

43 Diaz, L’épisolaire, ou, la pensée nomade, p. 175. My translation.

44 Roger Duchêne, “Du destinataire au public ou les métamorphoses d’une correspondance privée”, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 1 (1976): p. 37. My translation.

45 Nurmi and Pahta, “Multilingual Practices in Women’s English Correspondence”, p. 63.

46 Montagu Pennington, “Preface”, in Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot from the Year 1741 to 1770, to which are added, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Vesey, between the Years 1763 and 1787, vol. I, ed. M. Pennington (Printed for F.C. and J. Rivington, 1809), p. iii.

47 Pennington, “Preface”, pp. v–vi.

48 See also Melanie Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave, 2013), pp. 207–208.

49 Sylvia H. Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 1990); Agorni, “A Marginal(ized) Perspective on Translation History”.

50 On Elizabeth Carter’s London career, see Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, pp. 45-60.

51 Carter to Talbot, 5 November 1741, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, p. 9.

52 Ibid., p. 8.

53 On the literary career of Catherine Talbot, see Rhoda Zuk, Bluestocking Feminism. Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, vol. III (Pickering & Chatto, 1999). On her language skills, see Pennington, “Preface”, p. x.

54 Carter to Wright, 28 January 1741, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, pp. 2-3.

55 Carter to Talbot, 25 January 1742, in ibid., pp. 12-13.

56 Ibid., p. 13.

57 Carter to Talbot, 13 July 1748, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, p. 274.

58 Talbot to Carter, 11 November 1743, in ibid., p. 40.

59 See Carter to Talbot, 9 October 1744, in ibid., pp. 73–74; Talbot to Carter, 15 November 1744, in ibid., pp. 77–78.

60 Carter to Talbot, 5 August 1748, in ibid., p. 287.

61 Talbot to Carter, 10 June 1754, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. II, p. 172.

62 Carter to Talbot, 10 July 1754, in ibid., p. 175.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Carter to Talbot, 4 August 1742, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, p. 18.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., pp. 18–19. All translations of Elizabeth Carter’s plurilingual passages are mine, unless indicated otherwise.

68 Ibid., p. 19.

69 Talbot to Carter, 20 October 1742, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, pp. 21–22.

70 Carter to Talbot, 9 October 1744, in ibid., pp. 72–73.

71 Ibid., p. 72.

72 Ibid.

73 Talbot to Carter, 15 November 1744, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, pp. 76–77.

74 Ibid.

75 Carter to Talbot, 5 December 1744, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, pp. 79–80.

76 Jennifer Wallace, “Confined and Exposed: Elizabeth Carter’s Classical Translations”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22.2 (2003): pp. 315–16.

77 Pennington, Memoirs, p. 58.

78 Ibid., p. 269.

79 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 119–20.

80 Carter to Talbot, 5 December 1744, in Pennington, Series of Letters, vol. I, p. 81.

81 “Review of All the Works of Epictetus […]”, Monthly Review, 18 (1758), quoted in Vivien Jones, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (Routledge, 1990), pp. 174–75.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) through a doctoral fellowship grant [grant number: 1119024N].

Notes on contributors

Amélie Jaques

Amélie Jaques is a doctoral researcher at KU Leuven, where she conducts research on the shaping of female authorship and authority in Enlightenment Europe, and the (strategic) use of plurilingualism in letter writing. To that end, she combines methods from women’s studies, literary multilingualism studies, and studies on early modern correspondences. Her research is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Some of her first research results have appeared in Orbis Litterarum.