[]
The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters
  • Published: 1 July 2004
  • ISBN: 9780712664677
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

Formats & editions
EBook
8 Feb 2011
Tr. Paperback
1 July 2004
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

While many nineteenth-century women writers - such as George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, the Brontés - are now widely written about, the women who paved the way for them in the eighteenth-century are only now being given the attention they deserve.

If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869.

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century.

Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.
  • Published: 1 July 2004
  • ISBN: 9780712664677
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Norma Clarke

Norma Clarke is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University. She is the author of Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love, The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans and Jane Carlyle, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (published by Pimlico), many essays on eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers and several novels for children.
NC

Also by Norma Clarke

Dr Johnson's Women
See all

Praise for The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

A book of subtlety and distinction, a reminder of just how far feminist literary scholarship has come

Guardian

This book achieves far more than the rehabilitation of forgotten authors... Instead, she investigates the broader mechanisms of fame, the formation of authorial personae, and the mysterious reasons why some names rise while others fall...This is a subtle, persuasive and engrossing study

Independent

Inspirational...reveals a rich history of literary women who not only made a living from writing but were treated as the equals of their male peers... [It] should be a set textbook in English classes

Herald