Pichaya Damrongpiwat is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Cornell University, working on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century (1688-1815) with a broad emphasis on gender, affect, and theories of materialism. At NYPL's Berg Collection, she conducted research for her dissertation on rape and gendered violence in women’s writing in eighteenth-century British and Early American literature.

For many years, I thought that my research was about literary representations of rape and gendered violence. It was only until I came to the Berg Collection on a Short-Term Research Fellowship in August 2019 that I realized that my project was actually about female literacy.

But let’s start at the beginning…

Much of Frances Burney’s (1752-1840) extant archive is held here at the Berg Collection, including manuscript drafts of her novels, poetry, plays and other unpublished works, diaries, journals, and letters. My research focused on Burney’s celebrated first novel Evelina (1778) and the circumstances of its publication in relation to ideas of materiality in both fiction and archival practices, which stems from my claim that the novel is in fact a reconfigured rape plot—such as that of Richardson’s Clarissa (1748)—under the guise of a Jane Austen-esque courtship and marriage plot. This entails taking a closer look at original artifacts from Burney’s archive and discerning the traces and imprints of human engagement, and posing questions such as: what can the physical material tell us not only about particular pieces of writing, but about writing practices in general?

Burney’s archive is distinctive in this respect, in large part because of her practice of “recycling” paper. In the eighteenth century, paper was prohibitively expensive since it was made out of cloth, as opposed to wood-pulp, a cheaper alternative that was introduced later in the nineteenth century. In order to keep writing—an activity already frowned upon for young women of her social class—Burney salvaged “every scrap of white paper that could be seized upon without question or notice.”[1] This included a stray page from her father Dr. Charles Burney’s treatise on music, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773); the back of a playbill with an aria from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice; and personal correspondence to Dr. Burney from M. Olivier from Naples, Italy.[2]

It is also well known among Burney scholars and archivists that she practiced “extreme secrecy” when she wrote her first novel, Evelina, in a time when writing fiction and female propriety seemed impossibly opposed. Since she was her father’s amanuensis, copying out her father’s manuscripts, she feared that publishers would recognize her handwriting, and so wrote in a disguised hand.

What do these writing practices tell us about the circumstances of women’s writing at this time? Indeed, Burney’s practice of scavenging and “recycling” scraps of paper is more than just economic necessity. Although estimates vary, R. S. Schofield’s oft-cited survey of marriage registries[3] (The Marriage Act of 1753 required both parties to sign their names in the register) found that in 1750, only 40% of women, mostly upper-class, were literate, even as the proliferation of print—a tectonic media revolution not unlike the shift to our current digital ecosystem—meant that publications could reach the masses on an unprecedented scale. By 1790, there were as much as four times as many printed volumes than in 1750, but the literacy rate for women increased only marginally, to about 50%.

Today, these circumstances are so distant and alien to us that we fail to remember how, for a large proportion of women in Western Europe and America, access to writing was a scarce possibility. Even if you were literate, there was scarcely any paper. And even if you could write, like Burney, you still couldn’t write openly.

This is what I mean by “materiality”: materiality records how physical artifacts of writing bear witness to the ideas, stories, and traces of lived life non-discursively—that is, without using any words at all! These traces in turn live in the folds and creases of paper; in the fragmented shapes and tears of the page; in address panels crossed out; in letters written but never posted; on the back side of manuscript pages; in the ink blot that scars the paper. While much of archival research practices has historically focused on the work of cataloguing or textual recovery, Burney’s archive allowed me to introduce theories of materialism and gender in my own archival practice, and to think through new ways of engaging with archives in general.

Although this study of female literacy is confined to the long eighteenth century and covers reading and writing as literacy—a problem that has, by and large, gone away over time—I hope to continue this conversation in the present day with other forms of literacy that are inaccessible or denied to women, and by extension other marginalized populations. If we broaden our understanding of literacy to include forms other than conventional forms of reading and writing, we find pockets of illiteracy that are gendered or otherwise unique to certain groups, which can be financial, technological, healthcare- or bureaucracy-related, and so forth.

In other words, barriers to access are still as pervasive today as they were in the eighteenth century—it’s just that the forms have evolved.

Socially-minded businesses and development work have made great strides in improving financial literacy for women. In rural parts of India, Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, provides microfinance services to women without access to traditional banking. In Mexico, microcredit initiatives targeted at women are deemed efficacious only when household finances and family well-being improve in tandem with business outcomes.

Even here in New York City, the Census reported internet inequality all over the city: 27 percent of NYC households lack broadband internet at home, and 17 percent of households do not have a computer. Though the vast majority of schools have internet- and technology-based classroom practices in place, some students must finish their homework at the public library—including this one!

Problems of literacy, then, might not sound so dissimilar from those in the eighteenth century after all.

Nonetheless, this project also shows that despite all, women and others otherwise silenced often find a way to tell their story. In the Ovidian myth, Philomela’s tongue is mutilated by Tereus after he rapes her, in order to prevent her from telling others. In many accounts, including Chaucer’s in The Legend of Good Women, Philomela is illiterate, so she weaves a tapestry instead. Tereus is found out.

On June 13, 1767, the fifteen-year-old Frances Burney, though literate and an avid writer, was instructed to burn all of her writings in a bonfire. It was also her birthday. In 1778, the twenty-five-year-old Burney had ambitions for a novel but could not write without hiding from her family. Burney would stay up all night in the attic of her house, writing out more than three hundred pages of manuscript in the feigned handwriting. She had her brother, Charles, carry the manuscript to a publisher, Thomas Lowndes, in a long cloak-and-hat disguise. And so Evelina was born.