The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period.

The Professionalisation of Women Writers in Eighteenth Century Britain is a full study of a group of women who were actively and ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the height of the eighteenth century. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary reception, research into contemporary print culture and sociological models of professionalisation, Betty A. Schellenberg challenges oversimplified assumptions of women's cultural role in the period, focusing on those women who have been most obscured by literary history, including Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox.

Acknowledgements; Note on citations; Introduction: 'building on public approbation'; 1. Frances Sheridan, John Home, and public virtue; 2. The politicised pastoral of Frances Brooke; 3. Sarah Scott, historian, in the republic of letters; 4. The (female) literary careers of Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox; 5. Harmless mediocrity: Edward Kimber and the Minifie sisters; 6. From propensity to profession in the early career of Frances Burney; 7. Women writers and 'the Great Forgetting'; Coda; Notes; Bibliography; Index.