Mary Astell in Unquiet Women: A Character Analysis

Overview

Mary Astell (1666–1731) appears in Max Adams’s Unquiet Women as the earliest Enlightenment figure in a book that spans fifteen centuries of overlooked female lives. She is introduced in the author’s introduction as a philosopher “who out-thought John Locke,” and her own words form the book’s critical manifesto: the Chapter 3 epigraph in which she accuses male historians of erasing women’s achievements and dismissing them as “Men in Petticoats.” Adams dedicates a full chapter, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal,” to her life and ideas, positioning her as the intellectual heir to Christine de Pizan and a linchpin in the recovery of women’s history that the book undertakes.

Role in the Book’s Narrative

Unlike many of the medieval women Adams retrieves, Astell is not excavated from archaeological fragments or fragmentary legal records. Her story is deliberately placed near the end of the book, in Chapter 47, as the culmination of a long tradition of female intellectual resistance and nonconformity. She represents the dawn of the Enlightenment—the endpoint of the subtitle—and her life demonstrates how a woman could wield reason against systemic exclusion. Adams uses her to illustrate the book’s central argument: the erasure of women from historical narrative is not an accident but an active gendering of record-keeping. Astell herself articulated this argument in her 1705 work The Christian Religion, and Adams turns it into the project’s mission statement.

Motivations and Traits Shown through Actions

Astell’s driving motivation is the pursuit of truth through reason, a passion she frames as a “Romantick Passion” for knowledge. Adams presents this as both an intellectual and a moral calling. Her actions consistently prioritise mental independence over social convention:

• Self-education amid constraint: Although she was born into a Newcastle coal-trade family of diminished fortunes, she accepted the tuition of her uncle Ralph Astell, a clergyman whose own career collapsed due to drunkenness. When he died, she continued her studies alone, determined to “court Truth” despite the prevailing belief that knowledge was an unnecessary accomplishment for a woman.
• The London gamble: At twenty-one, penniless in the capital, she didn’t seek a husband or a governess post as her prospects suggested. Instead, she wrote a coolly humorous begging letter to Archbishop William Sancroft, securing a lifeline that led to a publisher. This action exemplifies her pragmatic blend of high principle and worldly savvy.
• Anonymous public voice: She published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) anonymously, as “a lover of her sex,” avoiding personal celebrity while maximising reach. Adams interprets this as a calculated bypass of gendered prejudice: the ideas, not the woman, would be judged.
• Religious identity as intellectual shelter: Astell self-identified as an “anchoress,” a modern Julian of Norwich, which Adams suggests gave her a socially recognised role that excused her from marriage and enabled a life of the mind. Her ascetic habits disinclined her from conventional social networking, yet she maintained influential correspondences with men like John Norris and debated Locke on equal footing.
• Political agency: Although a high-church Tory royalist and later a suspected Jacobite conduit, she wielded her political convictions to argue that gender should be less important than rank, pointing out that if all men were naturally superior to all women, then queens should obey their footmen. Adams portrays her political conservatism not as a contradiction to her feminism but as a logical extension of a worldview that valued order and reason above all.

Chronological Arc

Astell’s arc in the book moves from obscurity to posthumous vindication, mirroring the wider project of rescue:

1. Early promise (1666–1687): Born in royalist Newcastle a year before Paradise Lost. Her father’s death leaves the family impoverished, but her uncle’s tuition sparks her lifelong devotion to logic. His death in 1687 strands her intellectually but pushes her to London.
2. Self-reinvention (1688–1694): The move south forces her into a survival mode that she turns into opportunity. Sancroft’s patronage and the connection to publisher Richard Wilkin set the stage. Her correspondence with John Norris gains her intellectual credibility, and at twenty-eight she publishes A Serious Proposal, achieving immediate fame.
3. Public influence and private asceticism (1694–1709): Six editions of her proposal reach a wide readership, influencing Defoe and later Dr. Johnson. She debates Locke, engages with the intelligentsia of Chelsea—a “hotspot of female wealth, talent and literary taste” under Queen Anne—and nurtures friendships with women like Elizabeth Elstob and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Adams notes that she reserved her passionate friendships for women, describing her desires as “weaknesses” in letters to Norris, while publicly refusing earthly love in favour of the divine.
4. Practical legacy (1709–1731): In 1709, with the backing of wealthy female sponsors, she founds a charity school for thirty girls in Chelsea, putting principle into action. Her final years are marked by the physical ordeal of a mastectomy; she dies in 1731. Adams frames her posthumous neglect—her first biographer appeared only in 1752—as evidence of exactly the historical erasure she had diagnosed.

Key Relationships

• Uncle Ralph Astell: The formative intellectual relationship. His tuition gave her the tools she would use; his disgrace and death threw her onto her own resources. The relationship is explicitly credited with honing her mind.
• Archbishop William Sancroft: A patron who, responding to a begging letter, provided money and the introduction to Richard Wilkin. This relationship is presented as a testament to her charm and strategic intelligence.
• John Norris of Bemerton: A philosophical correspondent who recognised her talent and published their letters, boosting her profile. Adams uses this to show that she was taken seriously by male contemporaries.
• John Locke: The unnamed adversary of several allusions. Adams writes that she “dared to cross swords with the great liberal thinker John Locke, and sometimes beat him at his own game,” though the chapter does not detail specific debates. This antagonism is emblematic of her intellectual fearlessness.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Elstob: Women friends who formed a supportive network. Astell encouraged Montagu to publish her Ottoman letters; Elstob, a linguist, shared her northern origins and scholarly bent. These relationships illustrate the theme of intellectual networks and education.
• Queen Anne: Not a personal relationship, but Adams presents the queen as an “inspirational patroness” whose court provided a cultural milieu in which Astell’s ideas could thrive, and whose perhaps insufficient support meant the proposed women’s college never materialised.

Key Decisions and Consequences

• Writing A Serious Proposal: The decision to publish a blueprint for Protestant female academies—secularised versions of pre-Reformation convents—was bold. Adams notes that both Defoe and Johnson later borrowed the idea. The consequence was a lasting, though not immediate, influence on English education, even though women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge would not arrive until the 19th century. The proposal provoked public debate and made her famous, but also drew ridicule.
• Remaining unmarried: Astell’s critique of marriage as a state where a woman must obey a “disagreeable Person and Temper” and where “Folly and Ignorance” tyrannise “Wit and Sense” was radical. Adams cites her claim that if only virtuous men married, the world would be “thinly peopled.” By avoiding matrimony, she preserved her intellectual autonomy and modelled the independence she advocated. The consequence was social marginality offset by intellectual freedom.
• Founding the Chelsea charity school: In 1709, she moved from theory to practice, establishing a school for the daughters of military pensioners under the sponsorship of wealthy women. This decision—and the success of similar SPCK schools—represented a tangible intervention in the educational landscape. It also aligned her, perhaps unexpectedly, with a broader philanthropic movement and gave her the role of schoolmistress.
• Jacobite sympathies: Adams does not shy away from noting that Astell “flirted very seriously with Jacobitism” and may have acted as a conduit for correspondence between Stuart plotters, so much so that Robert Walpole had her followed. This decision, while morally and politically contentious, is integrated by Adams not as a flaw but as an aspect of her unwavering consistency: her loyalty to the Stuart monarchy, like her royalist upbringing in Newcastle, was part of the same worldview that led her to demand rational treatment for women.

Theme and Symbol Connections

Astell’s life and work intersect with multiple themes Adams threads through the book:

• Recovery of women’s history: The epigraph from The Christian Religion explicitly charges that male historians “seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women.” Adams uses Astell’s own diagnosis as the guiding principle of Unquiet Women, and her own life exemplifies the pattern: famous in her day, willfully neglected thereafter, rescued by twentieth-century scholarship.
• Intellectual networks and education: Astell’s circle—Norris, Elstob, Montagu, the Chelsea intelligentsia—demonstrates how women created and sustained intellectual communities even without institutional access. Her proposal for female academies is the most direct expression of the education theme in the entire book.
• Religious life as a dual-edged tool: Astell’s self-fashioning as an “anchoress” and her proposal of Protestant convents show a woman repurposing a medieval model of religious withdrawal for Enlightenment ends. Adams explicitly contrasts this with the dissolution of the monasteries, framing her project as a revival of a tradition that had empowered women like Hild of Whitby, but stripped of vows and directed toward education rather than contemplation alone. The life of celibate intellectual pursuit she chose was enabled by a religious persona, even as it freed her from patriarchal domesticity.
• Resistance and nonconformity: Astell’s entire life was a programme of resistance: to poverty, to the expectation of marriage, to intellectual condescension, and to historical invisibility. Her sharp rebuke—that if women are unprofitable it is men’s fault for “denying them the benefits of an ingenuous and liberal Education”—is a model of nonconformity that simultaneously uses reason against a system that refused reason to women.
• Women’s agency through material culture: Though Astell is primarily an intellectual figure, Adams embeds her in material realities: her pawning of clothes, her Chelsea home, the subscription concert lit by lamps and the moon. These small details ground her in the physical world of a woman navigating a city, earning a living, and creating an institution. The charity school, a concrete building filled with thirty girls learning to read, is the most substantial material monument to her agency.

Distinguishing Interpretation from Explicit Fact

Adams’s chapter is built on documented facts: the dates, publications, correspondence, and the charity school are all attested. The explicit evidence includes Astell’s own quotations from A Serious Proposal and her letters to Norris, as well as the epigraph. However, Adams also introduces interpretive claims that go beyond raw data. He calls her “the first English feminist” but immediately complicates the label, noting her Tory royalism and asceticism. The assertion that she “sometimes beat [Locke] at his own game” is an interpretive flourish based on her surviving arguments, not a documented defeat. The suggestion that Astell would have called her proposed academies “beguinages, or Cities of Ladies” is Adams’s speculative link to Christine de Pizan’s tradition. The idea that Queen Anne might have revolutionised women’s education “if she had not been put off by whispers in her ear warning of popery” is a counterfactual speculation meant to highlight historical contingency. Adams ties Astell’s political sympathies to her Newcastle upbringing with a plausible but uncited causal chain. For a reader, the key is to recognise that the quotes from Astell’s works are reliable evidence, while the connective narrative is Adams’s own synthesis of biography and historical imagination.

5 Book-Specific Questions with Direct Answers

1. How does the epigraph from Mary Astell function in the structure of Unquiet Women?

The epigraph—taken from Astell’s The Christian Religion (1705)—serves as the book’s manifesto. It declares that male historians deliberately erase women’s achievements and, when forced to mention them, dismiss them as aberrations (“Men in Petticoats”). Adams places it before any narrative begins, signalling that the entire book is a corrective act designed to counteract that centuries-long rhetorical exclusion. The epigraph makes Astell not just a subject but the theoretical lens through which the reader is meant to interpret every recovered life that follows.

2. What was Astell’s proposal for women’s education, and why did it provoke such strong reactions?

In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), Astell argued for the creation of residential academies where girls could receive a rational education away from male influence, in settings analogous to pre-Reformation convents but without religious vows. She pointed out the hypocrisy of men who complained that women did not think rationally while denying them the means of education. The proposal provoked strong reactions because it threatened the social order: it offered women intellectual independence and delayed or precluded marriage, both seen as destabilising. Adams notes that it was considered “ridiculous or, worse, impracticable” by many, but it went through six editions and influenced Daniel Defoe and Dr. Johnson.

3. Why does Max Adams describe Astell’s political views as challenging for modern readers?

Adams acknowledges that Astell, while often called the first English feminist, was an “unshakeably royalist Tory Anglican” who thought the English Republic “a mean, undemocratic project” and harboured Jacobite sympathies. She held that gender should be less significant than rank, arguing that if men were naturally superior to women, then queens should obey their footmen. These hierarchies of class and loyalty conflict with the egalitarian assumptions of 21st-century liberal feminism. Adams does not resolve the tension; he presents Astell’s complex allegiance as evidence that intellectual history resists neat ideological packaging.

4. In what ways did Astell’s personal life model the independence she advocated?

Astell never married, reserving her passionate attachments for women friends and her intellectual devotion for God and reason. She wrote that marriage could mean being “yok’d for Life to a disagreeable Person” and losing autonomy to an “absolute Lord and Master.” By living as a self-styled “anchoress,” she avoided the legal subordination of coverture and maintained control over her time, income, and writing. When she founded a charity school for Chelsea girls in 1709, she embodied the educational ideals of her proposal in a real institution, proving that women could lead educational projects outside the family sphere.

5. What lasting impact did Astell’s intellectual networks have, according to Adams?

Adams credits Astell with inspiring a generation of learned women, including the Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob and the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom she encouraged to publish her Ottoman letters. Although the proposed women’s college never received royal patronage, the idea seeded later educational reforms—Adams explicitly links it to Defoe’s and Johnson’s advocacy, and by extension to the 19th-century founding of women’s colleges. More subtly, the Chelsea circle of female writers and thinkers that assembled around Queen Anne’s court represented what Adams calls “an early Enlightenment all their own,” with Astell as its philosophical centre. Her pen proved that a woman could cross swords with Locke and be remembered, even if that memory had to wait two centuries for a fuller recovery.