The History Of British Women S Writing 1750 1830

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

Chosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. The first book to look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long eighteenth century, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men—one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history. Looser investigates the careers of Lucy Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Austen and shows how each of their contributions to historical discourse differed greatly as a result of political, historical, religious, class, and generic affiliations. Adding their contributions to accounts of early modern writing refutes the assumption that historiography was an exclusive men's club and that fiction was the only prose genre open to women.

This volume charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.

Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 explores issues of historical and literary genres, historiography, and the gendering of civic and literary roles. It demonstrates the new and sometimes subversive ways that women authors pushed the limits of writing history in order to participate in contemporary national civic life otherwise closed to them.

In the mid-eighteenth century, many British authors and literary critics anxiously claimed that poetry was in crisis. These writers complained that modern poets plagiarized classical authors as well as one another, asserted that no new subjects for verse remained, and feared poetry's complete exhaustion. Questioning Nature explores how major women writers of the era—including Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith—turned in response to developing disciplines of natural history such as botany, zoology, and geology. Recognizing the sociological implications of inquiries in the natural sciences, these authors renovated notions of originality through natural history while engaging with questions of the day. Classifications, hierarchies, and definitions inherent in natural history were appropriated into discussions of gender, race, and nation. Further, their concerns with authorship, authority, and novelty led them to experiment with textual hybridities and collaborative modes of originality that competed with conventional ideas of solitary genius. Exploring these authors and their work, Questioning Nature explains how these women writers' imaginative scientific writing unveiled a new genealogy for Romantic originality, both shaping the literary canon and ultimately leading to their exclusion from it.

This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women’s writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women’s literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women’s literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.