This dissertation explores how eight British women writers from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century honed their abilities to write, speak and conduct themselves effectively—in other words, how they pursued an education in rhetoric. Eight rhetorical biographies (of Hester Thrale Piozzi, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Shackleton Leadbeater, Elizabeth Montagu, Anne Grant, Catharine Macaulay Graham, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton) bring to light these women's processes of rhetorical education and practice over nearly a century across two generations within three broad genres. The rhetorical biographies show how eighteenth-century women learned and produced rhetorical theories and applied them over the course of their lives.
I demonstrate that while technically excluded from advanced formal education, these women were educated in a variety of classical and contemporary rhetorical theories and traditions through the interactive schools of conversation and epistolary correspondence. These informal schools, which were also important forums of rhetorical performance, assisted these eight women to stretch the boundaries of women's discursive practice to include more genres and a larger audience. By observing and critiquing rhetorical performances within communities of mentors, peers, and texts, eighteenth-century women writers acquired theories which they used to guide their own rhetorical practice. Although facets of all of the well-known rhetorical theories and traditions circulating in eighteenth-century culture were brought to these women through conversation and correspondence, among the most important regarded discourse in conversation and conduct and in the belles letters. These two rhetorical traditions as their base, combined with effective pedagogical methods, assisted British women writers of two generations from various local and religious backgrounds to contribute greatly to the growing pedagogical, theoretical, and performative traditions of rhetoric.