Historical Women's Writing – serie

The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives.Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This essay collection rediscovers and reassesses a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers.In the last few decades considerable advances have been made towards rediscovering, contextualising, and analysing women’s writing from Wales. The combined influences of the post-1960s women’s movement, the 1990s Welsh devolution successes, and the development of the ‘Four Nations’ school of British literary criticism, have together effected significant advances in the field of Welsh feminist literary studies. This book focuses in particular on: the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Welsh-language bards, such as Gwerful Mechain, Angharad James, and Marged Dafydd; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language poets, including Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Anne Penny, and Anne Hughes; contributors to the Romantic movement in Wales, such as the poets and novelists Mary Robinson and Ann of Swansea; the mid-nineteenth-century protesting voice of polemicists such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell); the Victorian English-language novelists, for example Louisa Matilda Spooner, Anne Beale, Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, and Mallt Williams, and their concern with national, class, and gender identities; and early twentieth-century Welsh-language writers engaged with Welsh Home Rule and women’s suffrage issues, such as Gwyneth Vaughan and Eluned Morgan.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

This volume broadens the critical understanding of Ann Radcliffe’s work and includes explorations of the publication history of her work, her engagement with contemporary accounts of aesthetics, her travel writing, and her poetry.Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was the best-selling author of the eighteenth century and her Gothic novels set the tone for a generation of Gothic writers. Regarded as having made a pioneering contribution to the Female Gothic of the period she was also an important critic of the Gothic’s different forms. This collection also includes an analysis of Radcliffe’s account of her medical ailments in her Commonplace Book which provides a new way of thinking about female bodies in pain and how they are represented in her novels.The collection provides an important critical reassessment of a major Gothic writer of the period. It will be of interest to scholars working on the Gothic, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This volume examines different types of women’s creative writing in support of the demand for the parliamentary vote, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, novels, and drama.The women’s suffrage movement became far more visible in the Edwardian period. Large demonstrations and militant actions such as destruction of property were widely reported in the press and reached a wide audience. Eager to get their message across, suffrage campaigners not only took collective action but also used women’s creative talents—whether as artists, musicians, or writers—to win hearts and minds for the cause. Through a close reading of contemporary texts, the chapters in this book reveal the diverse nature of the suffrage movement and its ideas, and the complex relationship between the personal and the political. The contributors also highlight the significance of women’s writing as a means to advance the suffrage cause and as a key element of suffrage propaganda.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

In this collection the multidimensional story of children’s literature in the formative period of the long nineteenth century is illuminated, questioned, and, in some respects, rewritten.Children’s literature might be characterised as the love-child of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements, and much of its history over the long nineteenth century shows it being defined, shaped, and co-opted by a variety of agents, each of whom has their own ambitions for it and for its child readership. Is children’s literature primarily a way of educating children in the principles of reason and morality? A celebration of the Rousseauesque child? A source of pleasure and entertainment? Women, both as writers and as nurturers involved at an intimate and daily level with the raising of children, recognised early and often very explicitly the multiple capacities of literature to provide entertainment, useful information, moral education and social training, and the occasionally conflicting nature of these functions.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This collection is concerned with the changing approaches to Jane Austen, her writings, and her afterlives, over the past two hundred years. It reflects on, and broadens understanding of, the cultural reach and reimaginings of Austen in view of the bicentennial celebrations of her published novels from 2011 to 2018.The ten contributors to this collection re-engage with key debates over Austen, her continuing appeal and significance as an author and a lucrative brand, and her cultural ubiquity. These essays are concerned with Austen’s national and international reputation; her critical reception; creative appropriations of her writings; and Austen’s afterlives in popular culture, in visual media, in ephemeral publications, in stage, in film, and in musical versions. Together, these essays by experts from across the UK, North America, Australia, and Scandinavia advance innovative readings of Austen’s novels and her transmedia legacies and shed new light on some of the complex reception processes that emerge from the study of this enduringly popular author. They also set out possible paths for scholarship on Austen in coming years.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This collection reappraises and retheorizes Marie Corelli’s diverse fictional writings and locates them in their contemporary literary and social context.Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was a fabulously popular novelist in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, in her day, critics railed against her taste for sentimentality, melodrama, supernatural worlds, and overt didacticism. Many critics are still ambivalent about her writing. However, in their reappraisal, the contributors to this volume largely circumvent the earlier critics and engage afresh with Corelli’s writing strategies; genre choices; representations of social issues; and ideas about science, metaphysics, and morality. Moving beyond the now outdated project of "recovery", the volume also discusses Corelli’s literary market place, analysing both her publishing successes and her decline in popularity. An important theme throughout is Corelli’s troubled relationship with an emerging literary Modernism and an ever-widening gulf between high and popular culture. The contributors interrogate the critical templates, assumptions, and biases of a literary establishment (past and present) centred on Modernist tropes and structures. As a result, the Corelli they unearth is not a defective Modernist but an innovative and original writer who eschewed the dictates of a movement with which she had no empathy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) is widely regarded as a pioneering figure within English-language women’s literary history. Best known as a poet, she was also a skilled translator, letter writer and literary critic whose subjects ranged from friendship and retirement to politics and public life. Her poetry achieved a high reputation among coterie networks in London, Wales and Ireland during her lifetime, and was published to great acclaim after her death. The present volume, drawing on important recent research into her early manuscripts and printed texts, represents a new and innovative phase in Philips's scholarship. Emphasizing her literary responses to other writers as well as the ambition and sophistication of her work, it includes groundbreaking studies of her use of form and genre, her practices as a translator, her engagement with philosophy and political theory, and her experiences in Restoration Dublin. It also examines the posthumous reception of Philips’s poetry and model theoretical and digital humanities approaches to her work. This book was originally published as two special issues of Women’s Writing.

The First World War was a transformative experience for women, facilitating their entry into new spaces and alternative spheres of activity, both on the home front and on the edges of danger zones in Europe and beyond. The centenary of the conflict is an appropriate moment to reassess what we choose to remember about women’s roles and responsibilities in this period and how women recorded their experiences. It is timely to (re)consider the narratives of women’s involvement not only as nurses, VADs and mourning mothers, but as pacifist campaigners, poets, war correspondents and contributors to developing genres of war writing. This interdisciplinary volume examines women’s representations of wartime experience across a wide range of genres, including modernist fiction, ghost stories, utopia, poetry, life-writing and journalism. Contributors provide fresh perspectives on women’s written responses to the conflict, exploring women’s war work, constructions of femininity and the maternal in wartime, and the relationship between feminism, suffrage and pacifism. The volume reinforces the importance of the retrieval of women’s wartime experience, urging us to rethink what we choose to commemorate and widening the presence of women in the expanding canon of war writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

The essays included in Mary Hays’s ‘Female Biography’: Collective Biography as Enlightenment Feminism emerge from the authors’ collaboration in producing the first modern edition of Hays’s work in the Chawton House Library Edition (2013, 2014). This book explores Hays’s larger ambitions to lay the foundation for an encyclopaedic work by, for, and about women. The scholars’ contributions to this volume engage with some of the multiple problems and possibilities that Female Biography presented. Drawing on this effort, individual scholars examine Hays’s attempts to correct existing masculinist constructs which framed the ‘universe of knowledge’ then and persist in our time. Hays perceived that these had the cumulative effect of rendering women invisible. She responded to such absence by providing examples of the extent of female worth across Western society. Other contributions focus specifically on the subjects of Hays’s entries, looking at how she used source material and laid the groundwork for future biographical studies of women’s lives.Both Female Biography and Hays herself have continually presented difficulties in categorization: not quite Enlightenment, not quite Victorian either. This book recontextualizes her work, demonstrating the radicalism and originality of her feminism, even in its post-Wollstonecraftian phase, as well as the longevity of her influence. As such, it will be of interest to those conducting research into Hays, her subjects, and the evolution of life-writing by women.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

In this collection the multidimensional story of children’s literature in the formative period of the long nineteenth century is illuminated, questioned, and, in some respects, rewritten.Children’s literature might be characterised as the love-child of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements, and much of its history over the long nineteenth century shows it being defined, shaped, and co-opted by a variety of agents, each of whom has their own ambitions for it and for its child readership. Is children’s literature primarily a way of educating children in the principles of reason and morality? A celebration of the Rousseauesque child? A source of pleasure and entertainment? Women, both as writers and as nurturers involved at an intimate and daily level with the raising of children, recognised early and often very explicitly the multiple capacities of literature to provide entertainment, useful information, moral education and social training, and the occasionally conflicting nature of these functions.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This volume examines different types of women’s creative writing in support of the demand for the parliamentary vote, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, novels, and drama.The women’s suffrage movement became far more visible in the Edwardian period. Large demonstrations and militant actions such as destruction of property were widely reported in the press and reached a wide audience. Eager to get their message across, suffrage campaigners not only took collective action but also used women’s creative talents—whether as artists, musicians, or writers—to win hearts and minds for the cause. Through a close reading of contemporary texts, the chapters in this book reveal the diverse nature of the suffrage movement and its ideas, and the complex relationship between the personal and the political. The contributors also highlight the significance of women’s writing as a means to advance the suffrage cause and as a key element of suffrage propaganda.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) is widely regarded as a pioneering figure within English-language women’s literary history. Best known as a poet, she was also a skilled translator, letter writer and literary critic whose subjects ranged from friendship and retirement to politics and public life. Her poetry achieved a high reputation among coterie networks in London, Wales and Ireland during her lifetime, and was published to great acclaim after her death. The present volume, drawing on important recent research into her early manuscripts and printed texts, represents a new and innovative phase in Philips's scholarship. Emphasizing her literary responses to other writers as well as the ambition and sophistication of her work, it includes groundbreaking studies of her use of form and genre, her practices as a translator, her engagement with philosophy and political theory, and her experiences in Restoration Dublin. It also examines the posthumous reception of Philips’s poetry and model theoretical and digital humanities approaches to her work. This book was originally published as two special issues of Women’s Writing.

This collection reappraises and retheorizes Marie Corelli’s diverse fictional writings and locates them in their contemporary literary and social context.Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was a fabulously popular novelist in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Yet, in her day, critics railed against her taste for sentimentality, melodrama, supernatural worlds, and overt didacticism. Many critics are still ambivalent about her writing. However, in their reappraisal, the contributors to this volume largely circumvent the earlier critics and engage afresh with Corelli’s writing strategies; genre choices; representations of social issues; and ideas about science, metaphysics, and morality. Moving beyond the now outdated project of "recovery", the volume also discusses Corelli’s literary market place, analysing both her publishing successes and her decline in popularity. An important theme throughout is Corelli’s troubled relationship with an emerging literary Modernism and an ever-widening gulf between high and popular culture. The contributors interrogate the critical templates, assumptions, and biases of a literary establishment (past and present) centred on Modernist tropes and structures. As a result, the Corelli they unearth is not a defective Modernist but an innovative and original writer who eschewed the dictates of a movement with which she had no empathy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This volume broadens the critical understanding of Ann Radcliffe’s work and includes explorations of the publication history of her work, her engagement with contemporary accounts of aesthetics, her travel writing, and her poetry.Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was the best-selling author of the eighteenth century and her Gothic novels set the tone for a generation of Gothic writers. Regarded as having made a pioneering contribution to the Female Gothic of the period she was also an important critic of the Gothic’s different forms. This collection also includes an analysis of Radcliffe’s account of her medical ailments in her Commonplace Book which provides a new way of thinking about female bodies in pain and how they are represented in her novels.The collection provides an important critical reassessment of a major Gothic writer of the period. It will be of interest to scholars working on the Gothic, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This essay collection rediscovers and reassesses a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers.In the last few decades considerable advances have been made towards rediscovering, contextualising, and analysing women’s writing from Wales. The combined influences of the post-1960s women’s movement, the 1990s Welsh devolution successes, and the development of the ‘Four Nations’ school of British literary criticism, have together effected significant advances in the field of Welsh feminist literary studies. This book focuses in particular on: the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Welsh-language bards, such as Gwerful Mechain, Angharad James, and Marged Dafydd; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language poets, including Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Anne Penny, and Anne Hughes; contributors to the Romantic movement in Wales, such as the poets and novelists Mary Robinson and Ann of Swansea; the mid-nineteenth-century protesting voice of polemicists such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell); the Victorian English-language novelists, for example Louisa Matilda Spooner, Anne Beale, Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, and Mallt Williams, and their concern with national, class, and gender identities; and early twentieth-century Welsh-language writers engaged with Welsh Home Rule and women’s suffrage issues, such as Gwyneth Vaughan and Eluned Morgan.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing. Chapter 7 is available Open Access at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367353483_oachapter7.pdf

This collection is concerned with the changing approaches to Jane Austen, her writings, and her afterlives, over the past two hundred years. It reflects on, and broadens understanding of, the cultural reach and reimaginings of Austen in view of the bicentennial celebrations of her published novels from 2011 to 2018.The ten contributors to this collection re-engage with key debates over Austen, her continuing appeal and significance as an author and a lucrative brand, and her cultural ubiquity. These essays are concerned with Austen’s national and international reputation; her critical reception; creative appropriations of her writings; and Austen’s afterlives in popular culture, in visual media, in ephemeral publications, in stage, in film, and in musical versions. Together, these essays by experts from across the UK, North America, Australia, and Scandinavia advance innovative readings of Austen’s novels and her transmedia legacies and shed new light on some of the complex reception processes that emerge from the study of this enduringly popular author. They also set out possible paths for scholarship on Austen in coming years.This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. As men have written women so have women written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however, there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th- and 19th-century masculinities. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality.Women Writing Men: 1689 to 1869 will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. As men have written women so have women written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however, there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th- and 19th-century masculinities. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality.Women Writing Men: 1689 to 1869 will be of interest to academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, Gender Studies, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.