The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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.

• Reveals the role women writers played in eighteenth-century public and literary culture • Challenges prevailing ideas of these writers as modest and domestic and uncovers their importance • Studies of the literary activities of Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Lennox and others

Introduction: ‘Building on public approbation’; 1. Frances Sheridan, John Home, and public virtue; 2. The politicized 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.

\'Schellenberg is interested in gender but resists the temptation to use it as the sole defining category of literary history. The result is a study that provides a refreshing counter to the over-generalizations that often plague literary history, and one that greatly enhances our knowledge of the working conditions of women writers of the period.\' Times Literary Supplement