Abstract
As the editor of this volume has noted, one of the tasks facing twenty-first-century historians of women’s writing is that of demonstrating ‘how and in what ways, rather than whether, women’s writing is key to literary history’.1 For the eighteenth century, this issue is overlaid by the persistence of non-print modes of production at a time when the world of letters was undergoing rapid transformation into a print-based culture. Thus the gender divide has often been mapped onto a divide between non-print and print media; between a feminized, private use of oral and manuscript forms on the one hand, and a masculine, public use of print on the other. Margaret J.M. Ezell’s influential 1993 work on Writing Women’s Literary History, for example, argued powerfully that a modern identification of authorship with print publication had led, anachronistically, to the neglect of much pre-eighteenth-century writing by women.2 And many writers have insisted that the lingering stigma of print as commercialized and vulgar was felt in a particularly acute way by women writers.3 Proper women, it could be inferred, predominantly conversed, wrote letters, kept journals, and exchanged manuscript poetry, while men dominated the production of periodicals and pamphlets and published the vast majority of religious, scientific, critical, and literary works.
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Notes
Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 ).
George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker, eds, Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 ), p. 5.
Gary Kelly, General Introduction to Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999 ), I, xlvii–li.
John Duncombe, The Feminiad; or, Female Genius, A Poem (London, 1754), pp. 4, 26, 22.
David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, Essays Moral, Political and Literary ( London: Oxford University Press, 1963 ), p. 568.
Montagu Pennington, ed., A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, 4 vols (London, 1809), II, 131.
Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady, 2 vols (London, 1773), I, iii–iv, 1–2.
Montagu Pennington, Dedication to Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu between the Years 1755 and 1800, ed. Montagu Pennington, 3 vols ( London, 1817 ), I, xi–xiii.
Frances Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, Arranged from his own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Collections, 3 vols (London, 1832), II, 270.
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© 2010 Betty A. Schellenberg
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Schellenberg, B.A. (2010). Bluestocking Women and the Negotiation of Oral, Manuscript, and Print Cultures. In: Labbe, J.M. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297012_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297012_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36198-4
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