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the early feminist writer Mary Astell, and so one could go on.
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It was a time of great processes as well as events:
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longer-term processes, great changes in the structures
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of society, in economic development,
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in political culture,
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in the growth of literacy and print culture.
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And it's also the period when, almost for the first time in
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British history, we have the evidence surviving
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that enables us to get to grips with the mass of the population
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and to explore the everyday dynamics of their lives,
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their relationships, their emotional palettes
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you might say.