ABSTRACT
Female authorship is a lose-lose proposition for Mariana Starke, as she proclaims in the preface to her first play, The Sword of Peace: “I have not confidence to stand the public gaze, nor vanity enough not to feel embarrassed as an avowed authoress.”1 The usage of “embarrassment” as an emotional state and an antonym for the “confidence”that Starke lacks before the “public gaze” was new in the late eighteenth century. For its primary definition of embarrassment as “of (or with reference to) affairs, circumstances … often in pecuniary sense,” the OED cites a seventeenthcentury reference as the earliest usage, whereas the first usage of the secondary definition, “constrained feeling or manner arising from bashfulness or timidity” is not until the late eighteenth century.2 Starke plays on the two meanings-the first, struggling to subsist on the earnings of her plays; the second, thrusting her own authority out of the subject position, as the passive “avowed” suggests-to show semantically that her embarrassment will not permit her to avow her avowal of authorship. Such embarrassment is a phenomenon that extends the implications of what Catherine Gallagher identifies as the “vacillating materiality of the signifier” for women writers of the eighteenth century (xxiv). Indeed, Starke’s humility goes beyond the humility topos of the confident author: she feels like an impostor.
