The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Description

The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain is the first full study of a group of women who, though they have been dismissed as mere domestic, conservative, and imitative novelists, were actively and ambitiously engaged in a wide range of innovative publication, as well as in creating the formal and informal institutions of the republic of letters. Working at the height of the century and contributing to its proliferation of print materials from the 1740s onwards, these women - Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox - were welcomed as participants in the literary and even political public spheres. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary reception, research into contemporary print culture, and sociological models of professionalization, Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period, focusing on those women who have been most obscured by subsequent literary history, whether traditional or feminist.

Betty A. Schellenberg is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.

'No less striking than the subtlety and learning that distinguish this study is the energy of Schellenberg's prose. This fine new book will establish Schellenberg as a major voice in the field.' Thomas Keymer, University of Oxford 'With admirable brilliance, lucidity, and grace, Schellenberg provides an illuminating corrective to assumptions that a woman writer can be defined as victim rather than as agent, or that gender is prime in determining an author's agency. In a cogent analysis of the works of a number of women authors, she reads their writings into the public sphere. This magisterial work is required reading for students of gender, literature, and history. ' Betty Rizzo, Professor Emerita, The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Centre