Kugler, Anne 1964–

PERSONAL:

Born February 20, 1964, in CA; married; children: two. Education: Attended Bryn Mawr College, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan; earned Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cleveland Heights, OH. Office—Department of History, John Carroll University, University Heights, OH 44118. E-mail—akugler@jcu.edu.

CAREER:

John Carroll University, University Heights, OH, associate professor of French and English history and chair of department.

MEMBER:

North American Conference on British Studies.

WRITINGS:

Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1644-1720, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne Kugler is an associate professor of French and English history and chair of the department at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. Her research interests include the role of women in European society. In Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1644-1720, Kugler examines the writings of Lady Sarah Cowper, a seventeenth-century woman who kept a detailed diary of some 2,300 pages in length over a period of sixteen years. In "the first book-length study" of Cowper, as Maureen E. Mulvihill noted in the Canadian Journal of History, "Kugler brings long-overdue attention to the writings of Sarah Cowper as a worthy scholarly subject."

Much of Cowper's diary recounts her troubled relationship with her husband, with hundreds of pages chronicling his ill temper, pettiness, and interference in the running of the household. But while documenting her unhappy marriage and touching upon other personal matters, Cowper also liberally stole text from published sources of her time and incorporated them into her diary. Kugler explained in the book's introduction: "Unlike her previous writing in commonplace books, where Cowper collected selections from her reading and often attributed her extractions to their author, in her diaries, she incorporated the words of other writers seamlessly into her own personal observations. In effect, she spoke in the voice of others without signalling that fact." "By illuminating and investigating these plagiarised strands," wrote Hannah Greig in Albion, "Kugler's examination of this powerful source reveals how Cowper read, interpreted, applied, and even subverted other forms of commentary to meet certain personal ends." Cowper used these texts to comment on her multiple roles as mother, wife, widow, employer, and member of the English gentry. "Kugler's treatment of this vast, cranky, and rather harrowing compilation is a distinguished addition to the growing body of work on the lives and writings of early modern women," wrote Frances Harris in the English Historical Review. "With careful scholarship and breadth of reference she analyses it in the context of contemporary ideologies and current debates." "Cowper's diary, and Kugler's subsequent analysis, provides a wealth of information about how one privileged, but disillusioned, woman made sense of her world," Greig concluded. Mulvihill found that "Kugler should take great pleasure and pride in having made an important contribution to scholarly reclamation of women's writings of the eighteenth century." Writing in her introduction to the book, Kugler noted: "Although Lady Sarah Cowper quite clearly inscribed the codes of her time, it is in the active, transforming, subversive purpose of women's writing that Sarah's diary is to be found. Her diary records the reworking of ideology and the construction of self-validating female identities in response to and by means of addressing prescriptive texts, within a written format that subverts conventional literary forms and models."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, winter, 2004, Hannah Greig, review of Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1644-1720, p. 656.

Canadian Journal of History, August, 2005, Maureen E. Mulvihill, review of Errant Plagiary, p. 322.

English Historical Review, September, 2003, Frances Harris, review of Errant Plagiary, p. 1060.

Journal of Modern History, December, 2005, Sara H. Mendelson, review of Errant Plagiary, p. 1075.

ONLINE

John Carroll University, Department of History, Web site,http://www.jcu.edu/ (May 2, 2008).

Stanford University Press Web site,http://www.sup.org/ (June 14, 2008).