Women s Writing,

Transcription

1 Women s Writing,

2 Jennie Batchelor Gillian Dow Editors Women s Writing, Feminisms and Futures

3 Editors Jennie Batchelor School of English University of Kent Canterbury, United Kingdom Gillian Dow Department of English University of Southampton Southampton, United Kingdom ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Control Number: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image Jozef Klopacka /Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

4 To Ben and Edward, conference babies born in the planning, and for whom the history of women writing is important too.

5 Contents Preface: Writing and Reading the Rugged Realities of Life 1 Isobel Grundy Introduction: Feminisms and Futures: Women s Writing Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow Passing Judgement: The Place of the Aesthetic in Feminist Literary History 21 Ros Ballaster Free Market Feminism? The Political Economy of Women s Writing 43 E.J. Clery Feminist Literary History: How Do We Know We ve Won? 61 Katherine Binhammer Anon, Pseud and By a Lady : The Spectre of Anonymity in Women s Literary History 79 Jennie Batchelor vii

6 viii Contents Authorial Performances: Actress, Author, Critic 97 Elaine McGirr Pay, Professionalization and Probable Dominance? Women Writers and the Children s Book Trade 117 M.O. Grenby There Are Numbers of Very Choice Books * : Book Ownership and the Circulation of Women s Texts, Marie-Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey Gender and the Material Turn 159 Chloe Wigston Smith Archipelagic Literary History: Eighteenth- Century Poetry from Ireland, Scotland and Wales 179 Sarah Prescott The Biographical Impulse and Pan- European Women s Writing 203 Gillian Dow Postscript 225 Cora Kaplan Bibliography 235 Index 255

7 List of Figures Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Authors of children s books from four publishing houses by gender, Authors of children s books from four publishing houses by genre and gender, Sampler, early nineteenth century, British, silk on linen canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bodkin (needle) case with lid, c. 1765, English (South Staffordshire), enamel on copper with hand -painted and gilt decoration, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Richard P. Rosenau Collection, a,b 168 ix

8 Notes on the Contributors Ros Ballaster is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the Faculty of English, Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of English at Mansfield College, Oxford. She has published widely in the field of eighteenth- century literature and has particular research interests in women s writing, oriental fiction, and the interaction of prose fiction and the theatre. She is the editor of The History of British Women s Writing, : Volume Four (History of British Women s Writing (2010). Seductive Forms: Women s Amatory Fiction was published in 1992 and Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England in Her article about the foundation of a women s studies course in the humanities at Oxford University appeared in a collection of 2012: Women s Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Studies: Designing and Delivering a Course in Gender at Postgraduate Level, in Teaching Gender (Teaching the new English), edited by Alice Ferrebe and Fiona Tolan (Palgrave). Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent, where she has worked since completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Chawton House Library in She publishes on eighteenth-century women s writing, material culture, the history of gender, sexuality and work and the eighteenthcentury charity movement. Her latest book Women s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, was issued in paperback by Manchester University Press in With Cora Kaplan, she is Co-Series Editor of Palgrave s ten-volume History of British Women s Writing and she is currently editing (with Manushag Powell) a collection of essays on eighteenth-century women and periodicals for Edinburgh University Press. From , she was the Principal Investigator of a Leverhulme Trust Project Grant on the Lady s Magazine ( ). Katherine Binhammer teaches eighteenth-century literature, feminist studies, and narrative theory in the Department of English and Film Studies at the xi

9 xii Notes on the Contributors University of Alberta. She has published The Seduction Narrative in Britain, (Cambridge, 2009), and essays in venues such as The Cambridge Companion to Women s Writing in Britain: , Feminist Studies, GLQ, Women s Studies, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in the Novel and The Journal of the History of Sexuality. Her most recent project focuses on downward mobility in the sentimental novel. She co-edited Women and Literary History: For There She Was (Delaware, 2003) and worked as a postdoctoral fellow on The Orlando Project in its initial years. Emma Clery is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at University of Southampton. Her books include The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, , Women s Gothic Writing from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley, and The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury, and has a book on protest poetry and economic crisis in the Romantic period forthcoming. Following the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship, she is currently working on a project entitled Romantic Women Writers and the Question of Economic Progress. Marie-Louise Coolahan is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2010) as well as articles and book chapters on Renaissance manuscript culture, textual transmission, early modern women s writing and its reception. She is currently principal investigator of the ERC-funded project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women s Writing, , and co-investigator on the research project led by Sarah Prescott at University College Dublin, Women s Poetry from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Gillian Dow is Executive Director of Chawton House Library, Hampshire, and Associate Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on women writers of the Romantic Period, in particular on translation and reception. She is the author of several edited collections in this area, including Translators, Interpreters, Mediators (Peter Lang, 2007) and Uses of Austen: Jane s Afterlives (Palgrave, 2012; with Clare Hanson) and has published on the crosschannel rise of the novel. Mark Empey is lecturer in History at National University of Ireland, Galway, and formerly postdoctoral researcher of the ERC-funded project, RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women s Writing, He is a cultural historian with a particular interest in book history and scholarly networks. Mark recently edited Early Stuart Irish Warrants, with the Irish Manuscript Commission (2015). His book Sir James Ware, : Politics, Culture and Identity in Seventeenth Century Ireland is forthcoming with Boydell Press. Matthew Grenby is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English at Newcastle University. He works on British cultural history in the period

10 Notes on the Contributors xiii , particularly on children s books, political fiction and book history. His books include The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution and The Child Reader Isobel Grundy FRSC, Professor Emeritus (University of Alberta, Canada), and a Patron of Chawton House Library, has published on topics in and around the eighteenth century, especially on Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and women s writing. With Susan Brown and Patricia Clements she created and still regularly updates the digital Orlando: Women s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge 2006, Cora Kaplan is Emerita Professor (Southampton University) and Honorary Professor (Queen Mary, University of London). She is a Patron of Chawton House Library. A feminist literary and cultural critic, her most recent book is Victoriana- Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007). She is General Editor, with Jennie Batchelor, of the ten-volume Palgrave History of British Women s Writing. Elaine M. McGirr is Head of Drama and Theatre Studiies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her most recent book, Partial Histories: a Reappraisal of Colley Cibber (Palgrave, 2016), returns the actor-manager-playwright- Poet Laureat and general bon viveur to the centre of early Georgian cultural life. Other publications include: Stage Mothers (Bucknell, 2014), co-edited with Laura Engel, The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis (Delaware, 2009), and chapters and articles on Shakespearean adaptation, the politics of Aphra Behn, the comedies of Colley Cibber, and the novels of Samuel Richardson. Current work focuses on celebrity, infamy, and the actress as an authorial agent. Sarah Prescott is Professor of English and Principal of the College of Arts and Humanities at University College Dublin. Professor Prescott specializes in seventeenthand eighteenth-century British and Irish women s writing, and pre-1800 Welsh writing in English. She is the author of Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, (2003), Women and Poetry, (2003), Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales (2008) and Writing Wales from the Renaissance to Romanticism (2012) as well as numerous papers and chapters in her subject field. She is currently completing a British Academy funded book on Women Writers and Wales, and co-writing volume three of the The Oxford Literary History of Wales. Professor Prescott is the Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme Trust collaborative project (with Aberystwyth University, the University of Edinburgh and the National University of Ireland, Galway) on Women s Poetry from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Chloe Wigston Smith is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, as well as essays on clothes without bodies, costume books, servant dress and map samplers. She is working on a book on gender and material culture in the Atlantic world.