Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit

Speculative investment and the popular novel can be seen as analogous in the early eighteenth century in offering new forms of ‘paper credit’; and in both, women - who invested enthusiastically in financial schemes, and were significant producers and consumers of novels - played an essential role. Examining women’s participation in the South Sea Bubble and the representations of investors and stockjobbers as ‘feminized’, Catherine Ingrassia discusses the connection between the cultural resistance to speculative finance and hostility to the similarly ‘feminized’ professional writers that Alexander Pope depicts in The Dunciad. Focusing on Eliza Haywood, and also on her male contemporaries Pope and Samuel Richardson, Ingrassia goes on to illustrate how new financial and fictional models offered important models for women’s social, sexual, and economic interaction.

• Highly effective linkage of speculative investment and the novel as analogous cultural developments of the early eighteenth century • New information on Eliza Haywood’s career, and on Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson as participants in literature and finance • New insights into women’s participation in speculative investment, and their role in the literary marketplace

Acknowledgements; Introduction: paper credit; 1. Women, credit and the South Sea Bubble; 2. Pope, gender, and the commerce of culture; 3. Eliza Haywood and the culture of professional authorship; 4. The (gender) politics of the literary marketplace; 5. Samuel Richardson and the domestication of paper credit; Conclusion: negotiable paper; Notes; Index; Bibliography.