Norah Smith ’26 has been named the 2025 recipient of the John S. Whipple Scholarship for 18th Century Studies, winning over the scholarship committee with her proposal titled, “Female Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Literature – Friendship, Hatred, and Lesbianism.”
The competitive award is given to one student each year and comes with a research stipend.
Smith was presented with the scholarship at the annual Shakespeare Sonnet Reading Festival on April 24, 2025.
With the stipend’s support, she will delve into the topic throughout her senior year, exploring how literary representations of female relationships changed with the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Her idea is grounded in Virigina Woolf’s theory that female friendships were often too simple and always in relation to men, a concept Woolf writes about in the 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own.”
She’ll be applying this concept to an analysis of Sarah Scott’s 1762 utopian novel “Millenium Hall,” which tells the story of the creation of a secluded female society.
After her proposal was chosen, Professor Gary Bouchard, Ph.D. of the English and Communications department, and the Executive Director of the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute, wrote, “This topic is certainly one worthy of research and writing.”
Smith is an English major with a minor in Professional and Creative Writing. Her love for literature has led her to be a friendly face in the Geisel Library where she holds a position as a student worker at the circulation desk. In her free time, she enjoys writing her own original works of poetry, some of which she presented at the Mind Over Major Conference in April of 2025.
“Female intimacy in literature has always fascinated me and most of the time, women in novels are relatively flat, static or only acknowledged in reference to men,” Smith said when asked about what led her to this topic. “So, I am excited to take a deep dive into a novel about a solely female utopia.”
Smith’s interest in this era of history mirrors that of the scholarship’s namesake, John S. Whipple. His son was a former postulant at the Saint Anselm Abbey and he established the John S. Whipple Scholarship to honor his father, who possessed a deep passion for the study of the 18th century. Whipple saw a great deal of value in the time period, viewing it as a transformative era in which a great deal of human thought and innovation occurred.
The scholarship is hosted in partnership with the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute, a place that was determined to be a fitting home for the scholarship, as well as the Office of College Advancement and the Office of Financial Aid.