ABSTRACT
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the female philosopher represented competing visions of the thinking woman. She both embodied Enlightenment ideals of the progress of civilisation, an avatar of rationality and refinement, and expressed anxieties about female agency, a nightmarish figure of intellectual, sexual and social threat. Romantic period women writers increasingly treated this figure as representational, a literary construct which allowed them to engage with political and cultural arguments about female expression. As the nineteenth century progressed, the female philosopher's hold on the feminist imagination became more diffuse.
