Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820

Richard De Ritter is Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds

• Introduction1. ‘Like a sheet of white paper’: books, bodies, and the sensuous materials of the mind2. ‘Wholesome labour’: the work of reading3. ‘The enlightened energy of parental affection’: post-revolutionary schemes of education4. ‘Leisure to be wise’: female education and the possibilities of domesticity5. Making the novel-readers of a country: pleasure and the practised readerBibliographyIndex

‘Imagining Women Readers provides a comprehensive look at the eighteenth-century economies of representation that informed the establishment both of gendered reading curricula and of the kinds of reading activities identified with acceptable forms of female domestic labor and pleasure. De Ritter’s study will be of interest to scholars working with archival material on the history of reading as a symbolic and physical or material activity, as well as those interested in the specific writers whom he references (including Wollstonecraft, More, Hays, Edgeworth, and Godwin).’Erin L. Webster-Garrett, Radford University, European Romantic Review‘Richard De Ritter reminds us of the great resistance to novel-reading that accompanied the expanding popularity of the genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries….This is an informative volume that includes a wealth of references about the dangers and challenges of reading.’George E. Haggerty, The University of California, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 57, No. 3, Summer 2017‘Richard De Ritter’s Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820: Well- Regulated Minds usefully tracks how assumptions about female reading practices changed over this period.’Talia Schaffer, SEL, Studies in English Literature, Vol. 57, No.4, Autumn 2017