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.