Revolutionary Correspondence: Reading Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren.

This article looks at the literary association of two eighteenth-century women, one British, one American, during the decades that surrounded the Revolutionary War. Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren are best known as historians, but this article argues for the importance of their letters and suggests a way of reading their correspondence in terms of the distinction Jürgen Habermas makes between literary and political public spheres in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . The author traces Macaulay and Warren's different situations within their particular republican milieus, and suggests how a language of feeling and the space of the letter might afford an important forum for transatlantic debate on women's literary and political identities. The article concludes by discussing Macaulay and Warren's correspondence in the broader context of women's letters in the Anglo-American Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]