The Young Elites

Product Description: Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male intellectual achievement in the long eighteenth century...read more

Product Description: Frances Burney and Narrative Prior to Ideology works between Burney’s Journals and Letters and her fiction more thoroughly than any study of her in the past twenty-five years. By doing so, it offers significant reinterpretations of Burney’s four novels: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer...read more

First published in 1981, this book explores the reactions of some female writers to the social effects of industrial capitalism between 1778 and 1860. The period set in motion a crisis over the status of middle-class women that culminated in the constructed idea of "women’s proper sphere". This concept disguised inequities between men and women, first by asserting the reality of female power, and then by restricting it to self-sacrificing influence. In this book, Judith Newton analyses novels such as Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in order to demonstrate how some female writers reacted to the issue by covertly resisting inequities of power and reconciling ideologies in their art. She argues that in this time period, novels became increasingly rebellious as well as ambivalent . Heroines were endowed with power, and emphasis was given to female ability, rather than to feminine influence.

Product Description: Unbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society...read more

Product Description: This edited collection, a tribute to the late noted eighteenth-century scholar Betty Rizzo, testifies to her influence as a researcher, writer, teacher, and mentor. The essays, written by a range of established and younger eighteenth-century specialists, expand on the themes important to Rizzo: the importance of the archive, the contributions of women writers to the canon of eighteenth-century literature and to an emerging print culture, the sometimes fraught relations within the eighteenth-century family, the relationship between life and literature, and, finally, the role of female companionship in women’s lives...read more

This studyargues that female networks of conversation, correspondenceand patronage formed the foundation for women's work in the 'higher' realms of Shakespeare criticism and poetry. Eger traces the transition between Enlightenment and Romantic culture, arguing for the relevance of rational argument in the history of women's writing.

Product Description: This book explores the ways in which five female radical novelists of the 1790s—Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft—attempted to use the components of private life to work toward widespread social reform...read more

Discussions about the development of the novel often jump directly from the 1740s, when Richardson and Fielding were particularly successful, to the 1770's, when women supposedly entered the marketplace in greater numbers. The little scholarship that focuses on the British novel in the 1750s has primarily addressed male output and concluded that the genre was faltering and in danger of extinction.Masters of the Marketplace is the first volume specifically to assess the importance of the 1750s in literary history and to argue that women novelists engaged in critical renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist project. This book highlights how these women controlled their literary circumstances, mining their prospects and nimbly responding to the changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideals, varied reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in epistemology. Their texts spoke in more pointed ways to societal inadequacies, and their use of amatory and sentimental fiction, two categories often ridiculed, in fact produced transgressive results. Thus they were masters of, rather than mistresses to, a rapidly changing publishing world.Indeed, in the 1750s women and men's novel output was nearly equal. The most prolific women authors of this decade, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Sarah Scott, were among the ten top producers of new fiction. Thus, women novelists had arrived at a crucial intersection in literary history when their interest in fostering public personae merged with a more amenable marketplace. This collection of essays shows how women took advantage of the brief window of opportunity and made an essential contribution to literary history.

Product Description: Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s discusses the work of three prominent women writers by focusing on the response to the French Revolution and the struggle for reform in Britain. Examining previously-neglected texts as well as more familiar ones, the book contributes to our understanding of a period of intense political and literary engagement...read more

Product Description: The Professionalisation of Women Writers in Eighteenth Century Britain is a full study of a group of women who were actively and ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the height of the eighteenth century. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary reception, research into contemporary print culture and sociological models of professionalisation, Betty A...read more

Product Description: This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century.Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim―despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions...read more

Product Description: A fascinating and underexplored feature of the English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel is that, whether written by man or woman, the «female»-narrated text codes and thematizes narrative travail. Female self-telling in these works is impelled and accompanied by psychic, rhetorical, even physical pain...read more

Product Description: This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels offered several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the forms of possession open to those denied a full civic identity...read more

Product Description: The first sustained scholarly study of "The Female Spectator", brings together an impressive collection of established and upcoming Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this ground - breaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that "The Spectator" was a target as well as a model...read more

Ruth Perry's major study describes the transformation of the English family, as represented in fiction, in the context of major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century. These include the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture.

Product Description: Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety...read more

Product Description: This work focuses on the issue of women's education in a series of novels written by women in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the surface plots are conservative, thus reaffirming the social order; on the other hand, numerous subversive narrative techniques undermine the surface stories, drawing attention to the consequences of the arbitrary limitations society imposed on middle-class women as well as to the sense of entrapment and the resulting anxieties they experienced...read more

Product Description: This work offers, firstly, a fresh historical, philosophical and cultural interpretation of the relation between the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, the sublime, and the theory and practice of eighteenth-century law. Secondly, the work exposes and explores the influence of this combination of discourses upon the formation of gender identities in this period...read more