The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period.

Betty A. Schellenberg (Author)

9780521850605, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 June 2005

262 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.56 kg

'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

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. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period, focusing on those women who have been most obscured by literary history, including Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox.

Acknowledgements
Note on citations
Introduction: 'building on public approbation'
1. Frances Sheridan, John Home, and public virtue
2. The politicised pastoral of Frances Brooke
3. Sarah Scott, historian, in the republic of letters
4. The (female) literary careers of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox
5. Harmless mediocrity: Edward Kimber and the Minifie sisters
6. From propensity to profession in the early career of Frances Burney
7. Women writers and 'the Great Forgetting'
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]