Women and print: readers, writers and the market

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521810173.008

6 - Women and print: readers, writers and the market

from PART II - ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010

Isobel Grundy

Edited by

Michael F. Suarez, SJ and

Michael L. Turner

Show author details

Michael F. Suarez, SJ: Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Michael L. Turner: Affiliation:
Bodleian Library, Oxford

Book contents

Get access

Summary

What difference did women make to the book trade during the long eighteenth century? Female authorship and female readership burgeoned during this period, and some women were also active in the trade itself. If this had not been the case, if women had been illiterate and if writers, publishing workers and readers had all been male, would the production and consumption of books, what Robert Darnton calls ‘the social and cultural history of communication by print’, have developed differently?

Such hypothetical questions are clearly unanswerable, up there in the lunar sphere along with questions about the survival of Queen Anne’s son and Wolfe’s defeat on the Plains of Abraham. Nevertheless, just asking them may help to clarify the issue of what is being investigated in a study of women and eighteenth-century print culture. Any account of women’s contributions to the eighteenth-century book trade and the practices of reading and writing, or of the difference between their experience and that of men, keeps one eye on the unanswerable questions.

Keywords

female readership female authorship book trade women writers literary marketplace

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain , pp. 146 - 160

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521810173.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benedict, B. M. 2000 ‘Jane Austen and the culture of circulating libraries: the construction of female literacy’, in Backscheider 2000.Google Scholar

Boswell, J. 1934–1950 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. HillPowell, rev. G. B. L. F., 2nd edn, 6 vols., Oxford.

Boyd, E. 1732 The happy-unfortunate, or the female page: a novel, London.

Bracken, J. K. and Silver, J. 1996 Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. CLXX: The British literary book trade, 1475–1700, Detroit, MI.

Brewer, J. 1997 The pleasures of the imagination: English culture in the eighteenth century, London.

Broomhall, S. 2002 Women and the book trade in sixteenth-century France, Aldershot.

Brown, S., Clements, P. and Grundy, I. (eds.) 2006 Orlando: women’s writing in the British Isles from the beginnings to the present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online, http://orlando.cambridge.org.

Budd, A. 2002 ‘“Merit in distress”: the troubled success of Mary Barber’, Review of English Studies, 53, 210 –27.Google Scholar

Darnton, R. 1990 The kiss of Lamourette: reflections on cultural history, New York.

Fenwick, E. 1998 Secresy, or the ruin on the rock, ed. Grundy, I., 2nd edn, Peterborough, Ont.

Fergus, J. 1984 ‘Eighteenth-century readers in provincial England: the customers of Samuel Clay’s circulating library and bookshop in Warwick 1771–72’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 78.Google Scholar

Fergus, J. and Thaddeus, J. F. 1987 ‘Women, publishers, and money, 1790–1820’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17.Google Scholar

Grundy, I. 1988 ‘Sarah Gardner: “such trumpery” or “a lustre to her sex”’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 7.Google Scholar

Grundy, I. 1994 ‘Books and the woman: an eighteenth-century owner and her libraries’, English Studies in Canada, 20, 1.Google Scholar

Jones, M. G. 1952 Hannah More, Cambridge.

Marishall, J. 1789 A series of letters, 2nd edn, 2 vols., London.

McDowell, P. 1998 The women of Grub Street: press, politics and gender in the London literary marketplace, 1678–1730, Oxford.

McDowell, P. 1999 ‘Women and the business of print’, in Jones 1999 –54.

McIntosh, C. 1998 The evolution of English prose, 1700–1800: style, politeness, and print culture, Cambridge.

Montagu, Lady M. W. 1993 Essays and poems and ‘Simplicity’, a comedy, ed. Halsband, R. and Grundy, I., 2nd edn, Oxford.

Morgan, F. (ed.) 1992 The Female Tatler, London.

Prescott, S. and Spencer, J. 2000 ‘Prattling, tattling and knowing everything: public authority and the female editorial persona in the early essay-periodical’, British Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies, 23.Google Scholar

Raven, J. 1992 Judging new wealth: popular publishing and responses to commerce in England, 1750–1800, Oxford.

Raven, J. 2000a ‘Historical introduction: the novel comes of age’, in Garside, Raven and Schöwerling 2000, I.

Schellenberg, B. A. 2002 ‘Connecting the dots: plotting and reading the (woman) writer’s career’, Canadian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, Quebec, 24 Oct. 2002.

Simonton, D. 1998 A history of European women’s work: 1700 to the present, London.

Stanton, J. 1988 ‘Statistical profile of women writing in English from 1660 to 1800’, in Keener and Lorsch –54.

Suarez, M. F., 2000 ‘The business of literature: the book trade in England from Milton to Blake’, in Womersley 2000 –47.

Treadwell, M. 1982a ‘London trade publishers, 1675–1720’, Library, 6th ser., 4.Google Scholar

Waldron, M. 1996 Lactilla, milkwoman of Clifton: the life and writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806, Athens, General Advertiser.

Book contents

6 - Women and print: readers, writers and the market

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive