This book is about mapping the future of eighteenth-century women's writing and feminist literary history, in an academic culture that is not shy of declaring their obsolescence. It asks: what can or should unite us as scholars devoted to the recovery and study of women's literary history in an era of big data, on the one hand, and ever more narrowly defined specialization, on the other? Leading scholars from the UK and US answer this question in thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary and often polemical essays. Contributors attend to the achievements of eighteenth-century women writers and the scholars who have devoted their lives to them, and map new directions for the advancement of research in the area. They collectively argue that eighteenth-century women's literary history has a future, and that feminism was, and always should be, at its heart. Featuring a Preface by Isobel Grundy, and a Postscript by Cora Kaplan.

This collection comprises selected essays from a conference held at Chawton House Library in March 2006. It focuses on women writers as translators who interpreted and mediated across cultural boundaries and between national contexts in the period 1700-1900. In this period, which saw women writers negotiating their right to central positions in the literary marketplace, attitudes to and enthusiasm for translations were never fixed. This volume contributes to our understanding of the waxing and waning of the importance of translation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rejecting from the outset the notion of translations as 'defective females', each essay engages with the author it discusses as an innovator, and investigates to what extent she viewed her labours not as hack-work, nor as an interpretation of the original text, but rather as a creative original. Authors discussed are from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Turkey and North America and include figures now best known for their other publications, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Isabelle de Charriere, Therese Huber and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as well as lesser-known writers such as Fatma Aliye, Anna Jameson and Anne Gilchrist.

This book focuses on how Austen's life and work is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between Modernist Austen in the early C20th and feminist and post-feminist appropriations in the later C20th, it examines how Austen emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage.

Some of the theories Genlis adopts in the education of the eponymous children have their roots in Rousseau's "Emile". However, Genlis herself suggested that Rousseau knew little of the practical education of children. This work is placed within the context of the late eighteenth-century debate on female education.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.

This book focuses on how Austen's life and work is being re-framed and re-imagined in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. Tracing the connections between Modernist Austen in the early C20th and feminist and post-feminist appropriations in the later C20th, it examines how Austen emerged as a complex point of reference on the global stage.

Published in 1783, this translation was hugely popular in late eighteenth-century Britain. It was read as a system of education by authors such as Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Clara Reeve, and is mentioned at the end of Jane Austen's Emma. Some of the theories Genlis adopts in the education of the eponymous children have their roots in Rousseau's Emile. However, Genlis herself suggested that Rousseau knew little of the practical education of children, and she endeavors to rectify this in her own novel, focusing particularly on the education of the female child, Adelaide. This important and influential work can therefore be placed within the context of the late eighteenth-century debate on female education.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion in Europe of interest in foreign languages and literatures. This book explores how early generations of women writers formed connections with each other across national boundaries. The volume sheds light on female networks spanning Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland and Denmark. It includes essays on 'virtual' networks, that is, on women who read, translated or were inspired by the work of women abroad, as well as essays exploring actual links between writers of different nationalities, be it through correspondence, visits or contact in the salons. The essays gathered here engage with a wide range of published and unpublished sources, from novels and poetry to autobiography and letters. They discuss writers whose work is becoming increasingly well known, such as Maria Edgeworth, Germaine de Stael, Rahel Varnhagen and George Sand, as well as those who are less familiar. Together, they open up new perspectives on the activities of these early women of letters and on the development of the European female literary tradition. The volume is based on selected papers from a conference held at Chawton House Library in 2008 in conjunction with the pan-European 'New Approaches to European Women's Writing' research project.