What Has Been, originally published in 1801, is an affecting, lively, and accessible read for scholars and students of the long eighteenth century. This critical edition includes an extensive introduction, notes, and appendices. Eliza Kirkham Mathews’ portrait of a struggling female novelist connects and also distinguishes What Has Been from novels by now-canonical female authors of this period. Simultaneously, it provides a new vantage-point for assessing obscure or long-forgotten novels. This volume will be of great interest to teachers and scholars of the long-eighteenth century and Romantic era, and on such far-ranging topics as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, British Romanticism, feminism, women’s literature, the gothic, and the ‘novel of purpose’ or Jacobin/anti-Jacobin novel.
