Women Characters’ Cross-Cultural (Self-)Development in Mary Margaret Busk’s Zeal and Experience

A Tale and Tales of Fault and Feeling

Abstract

This article focuses on the importance of women characters’ education in Mary Margaret Busk’s Zeal and Experience: a Tale (1819) and Tales of Fault and Feeling (1825). A translator and cultural mediator, Mary Margaret Busk (1779–1863) was one of the first women writers to publish review articles on European literatures in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a high-brow, conservative journal with a large readership and, it has often been assumed, mostly written by male authors. This contribution intends to analyse the importance of women characters’ education in her tales, which also foregrounds her interest in cross-cultural relations.