This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. Building on the success and popularity of earlier poets, novelists, playwrights, and philosophers, British women consolidated their significance as writers in the second half of the long eighteenth century. They participated in movements like Bluestocking intellectualism, abolition, new understandings of class, religion, and childhood. They initiated literary styles like the novel of sensibility, the elegiac sonnet, and the historical romance. Their writing both signalled transitions (from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from Romanticism to early Victorianism) and transcended conventional literary periodization. The last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery have overturned the assumption that women wrote unambitiously and mostly anonymously, concentrating on 'feminine' concerns like the family and the home. Instead, an understanding of the period which sees Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Austen as only the more familiar of a host of writers has become standard
List of Figures -- Author Preface -- Series Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Chronology -- Introduction: Defining 'Women's Writing'; or, Writing 'The History'; J.M. Labbe -- PART I: 1750-1830: OVERVIEWS -- Women and Print Culture, 1750-1830; M. Levy -- Women's Travel Writing, 1750-1830; K. Turner -- PART II: 1750-1800: REVOLUTIONS IN FEMALE WRITING -- Bluestocking Women and the Negotiations of Oral, Manuscript and Print Cultures; B.A. Schellenberg -- '[T]o strike a little out of a road already so much beaten': Gender, Genre and the Mid-Century Novel; J. Batchelor -- Anglophone Welsh Women's Poetry 1750-1784: Jane Cave and Anne Penny; S. Prescott -- The Poem That Ate America: Helen Maria Williams' Ode on the Peace (1783); K. Davies -- Picturing Benevolence Against the Commercial Cry, 1750-1798: or, Sarah Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism; D. Landry -- Women Writers and Abolition; D. Coleman -- Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Romance of Real Life; S. Curran -- Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and the First Year of War with France; H. Guest -- PART III: 1800-1830: WORLDS OF WRITING -- The Porter Sisters, Women's Writing, and Historical Fiction; D. Looser̐Μư -- Joanna Baillie's Emblematic Theatre; B. Bolton -- National Internationalism: Women's Writings and European Literature, 1800-1830; D. Saglia -- Jane Austen's Critical Response to Women's Writing: 'a good spot for fault-finding'; O. Murphy -- Mary Tighe and the Coterie of British Women Poets in Psyche; H.K. Linkin -- Influence, Anxiety, and Erasure in Women's Writing: Romantic Becomes Victorian; S.C. Behrendt -- Bibliography -- Index
