The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

by Betty A. Schellenberg

• ISBN13: 9780521850605
• ISBN10: 0521850606
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
A note on citations	x
Introduction: ``building on public approbation''	1	(22)
Frances Sheridan, John Home, and public virtue	23	(22)
The politicized pastoral of Frances Brooke	45	(31)
Sarah Scott, historian, in the republic of letters	76	(18)
The (female) literary careers of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox	94	(26)
Harmless mediocrity: Edward Kimber and the Minifie sisters	120	(21)
From propensity to profession in the early career of Frances Burney	141	(21)
Women writers and ``the Great Forgetting''	162	(19)
Coda	181	(2)
Notes	183	(49)
Bibliography	232	(13)
Index	245