This edited volume is the first to reflect on the theory and practice of editing women’s writing of the 18th century. The list of contributors includes experts on the fiction, drama, poetry, life-writing, diaries and correspondence of familiar and lesser known women, including Jane Austen, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood and Mary Robinson. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings not only of the woman writer and women’s literary history, but also of our own editorial practice.
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840
Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer
2. An Ambitious and Quixotic Series: the Ever-Shifting Role of the Editor: Chawton House Library Series
Lorna J. Clark
3. Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–6): Making (and Unmaking) a Periodical ‘for Women’
Kathryn R. King
4. Mary Robinson’s Poetry and Questions of Quality
Daniel Robinson
5. Annotating Delariver Manley: Stripping Away Preconceptions of Gender and Genre
Rachel Carnell
6. Julie and Julia: Tracing Intertextuality in Helen Maria Williams’s Novel
Natasha Duquette
7. Romancing the Past: Women’s Historical Fiction, Editorial Pains and Practices
Fiona Price
8. A ‘Piece written by a Lady’: Gender, Anonymous Authorship and Editing The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760)
Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt
9. ‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?: Editing Women’s Court Memoirs
Amy Culley
10. ‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’: Editing Women in the Chawton House Library Series
Anna M. Fitzer
11. Publishing Frances Burney’s Journals and Letters in Twenty-Five Volumes
Peter Sabor
12. ‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’: the Rationale for A Digital Edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s Letters
Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl
Selected Works Cited
Biography
Amy Culley is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor with Daniel Cook of Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Palgrave, 2012) and editor of Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, volumes 1–4 (Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
Anna M. Fitzer is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. She is editor of Memoirs of Women Writers Part I (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), a four-volume set in the Chawton House Library series incorporating Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More, and Some Account of Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer.
"If the focus of Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840 is a little more delimited than its title suggests, its detailing of intriguing and invaluable editorial projects is itself a celebration of the Chawton House Library Series and of the ongoing project of recovering women writers from the archives of the past. Like the editorial projects it discusses, the volume itself contributes to this recovery project and to continuing consideration of how editors might best position themselves and their texts in order to transform women’s writing, in all its variability from the familiar to the fluid and challenging, for a modern-day readership. " - Sarah C.E. Ross , Victoria University Of Wellington
