Revising Mary Astell: Anna Howe’s Reflections on Marriage in Samuel Richardson’s <i>Clarissa</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), Anna Howe’s criticisms of the power inequities in courtship and marriage echo Mary Astell’s arguments in Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), occasionally replicating the author’s language. While scholars often associate Anna with feminist arguments for women’s autonomy, I argue that Anna acts as a surrogate voice for Astell, revealing Richardson’s concerns about the implications of female autonomy represented in Anna’s similar claims to prefer the single life to marriage. Over the course of the novel, Richardson revises Anna’s opinions about marriage, especially her scepticism about the likelihood she can be happy once married to Mr Hickman. In the same way, Richardson’s revisions to the 1730 edition of Astell’s Reflections demonstrate his attempt to bring Astell’s opinions closer to his own. Placing Anna’s thoughts on marriage alongside Astell’s Reflections illustrates Richardson’s engagement with her ideas throughout his career as an author and printer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".