Biography

Ann Wheeler (1734-1804)

Ann Wheeler published her Westmoreland Dialogues in the 1790s, a period when the standard of correctness of language was a hot political issue. Her writing suggests that dialect-speakers like her were being “othered” by fashionable visitors to the region whose picaresque tourism was little more than voyeurism. Consideration of Ann Wheeler’s life and writing allows for a contemporary understanding about what “local culture” might have meant to a woman from Westmoreland writing in the late eighteenth-century.

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