The History of British Women's Writing, 1750-1830: Volume Five

The period from 1750-1830 witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. Building on the success and popularity of earlier poets, novelists, playwrights, and philosophers, British women consolidated their significance as writers in the second half of the long eighteenth century. They participated in movements such as Bluestocking intellectualism and abolition, and contributed to new understandings of class, religion, and childhood. They initiated literary styles including the novel of sensibility, the elegiac sonnet, and the historical romance. Their writing both signalled transitions (from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from Romanticism to early Victorianism) and transcended conventional literary periodization. The last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery have overturned the assumption that women wrote unambitiously and mostly anonymously, concentrating on 'feminine' concerns like the family and the home. Instead, an understanding of the period which sees Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Austen as only the most familiar of a host of writers has become standard.