British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century

CORA KAPLAN is Professor of English at the University of Southampton. A feminist cultural critic who focuses on women's writing before 1900, her books include Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism, Genders (with David Glover) and Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms. She is, with Jennie Batchelor, General Editor for the new Palgrave Macmillan series, A History of British Women's Writing. JENNIE BATCHELOR is Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. She has published on women and gender in the eighteenth century, and is an Associate Editor of the e-journal CW3, the journal of the Corvey Women's Writers Project and is a General Editor with Cora Kaplan of the new Palgrave Macmillan series, A History of British Women's Writing. Her first monograph, Dress, Distress and Desire, is published in 2005.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; J.Batchelor & C.Kaplan PART I: AUTHORSHIP AND PRINT CULTURE Woman's Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the Novels of Sara Scott; J.Batchelor Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose?; N.Clarke Spectral Texts in Mansfield Park ; K.Halsey Romantic Patronage: Mary Robinson and Coleridge Revisited; J.Hawley Ivory Miniatures and the art of Jane Austen; J.Todd Mansfield Park - What did Jane Austen Really Write? The Texts of 1814 and 1816; B. Southam PART II: HISTORY AND POLITICS 'Thou monarch of my Panting Soul': Hobbesian Obligation and the Durability of Romance in Behn's Love Letters ; H.Thompson British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a 'Feminine Orient'; F.A.Nussbaum 'Tied to Their Species By the Strongest of All Relations': Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rewriting of Race as Sensibility: M Rickman Hannah More and Conservative Feminism; H.Guest Chawton House: Gathering Old Books for a New Library; I.Grundy Index

'This important book of new essays is a fitting tribute to the opening in 2003 of the Chawton House Library and Study Centre. Like the Chawton Library itself, Batchelor and Kaplan's collection is powerful evidence of the vitality of research and scholarship on women's writing in the long eighteenth century. Alert to the complex politics of authorship and gender, the case studies offered here are yet further evidence of women's involvement at the heart of eighteenth-century print culture. And in bringing together the work of established critics with that of younger scholars, they represent some of the most exciting work on this period currently available.' - Vivien Jones, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture, University of Leeds, UK 'With its many strong essays, sensible organization and contextualization in the introduction and in Grundy's closing essay, British Women's Writing is an important contribution to our understanding of female authorship in this period.' - Laura J. Rosenthal, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature '...[a] fine volume...whets the appetite to read, to make sense of, and to write about more British women's texts of the long eighteenth century.' - Devoney Looser, The Age of Johnson