Genealogy of the Gentleman

Mary Beth Harris is assistant professor at Emporia State University where she teaches English and serves as the Director of the Composition Program. Her book A Genealogy of the Gentleman: Women Writers and Masculinity in the Eighteenth-Century was published March 2024 by University of Delaware Press. Her other most recent work can be found in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and The Eighteenth Century, as well as in two edited collections, Castration, Impotence, and Emasculation in the Long Eighteenth Century and A Spy on Eliza Haywood: Addresses to a Multifarious Writer.

• Acknowledgments Introduction  1. Gentleman Spectator as Desiring Author: The Spectator and Mary Davys’s Reform’d Coquet2. The Gentleman of Letters as Passionate Reader: Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and David Hume’s Philosophy of Moral Sympathy3. Romancing the Gentleman Critic: Reading Criticism as Generic Courtship in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler4. “Smartly Dealt With; Especially by the Ladies”: The Women Writers of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison5. The Gentleman as Authorial Drag: Inverting Plots, Homosociality, and Moral Authorship in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story and Mary Robinson’s WalsinghamCoda: But They Were All Written by Women NotesBibliographyIndex