According to Mary Favret, “the women poets writing at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century are impossible to categorize as a group; their styles, preoccupations, politics, and reasons for writing vary widely.” Anna Barbauld, in rebuffing Maria Edgeworth’s request to found a women’s literary journal in 1804, put it even more bluntly: “There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them.” The diversity and lack of solidarity among women writers of the period poses challenges for pedagogy and research. For scholars of the Romantic period, the one unifying narrative that has achieved some consensus over the last decade is a feminist, historicist one, which imagines women as active and equal participants in a vital public sphere (see Harriet Guest, (2000); Mellor, (2000); and collections edited by Catherine Burroughs, (2000) and Elizabeth Egger ()).

This influential scholarship, important as it is, suffers in one critical respect: it fails to scrutinize print as the media that enabled women’s involvement in public life. Since 2005, Romantic studies have seen a new wave of bibliographical and quantitative scholarship in the history of the book, work which charts the explosive growth and innovation in the printing trade during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (William St. Clair, (2005); Richard Sher, (2006); James Raven, (2007); Andrew Piper, (2009)). Although these studies do not ignore women writers and questions of gender, no comprehensive attempt has been made to describe the role women played in this rapidly expanding press (as well as how some women resisted print). This course will attempt to bring together current research on women’s writing with that done on the history of the book during the period 1770-1830.

This course has four main objectives:

1. To acquire a thorough grounding in the work of and scholarship on, eight of the major women writers of the period: Lucy Aikin, Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Anna Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Dorothy Wordsworth. These authors have been selected for the diversity that they represent in terms of media, genre, subject matter, and reception history.
2. To understand the material conditions in which women’s writing of the period was produced and disseminated, specifically: (a) the publication choices available to women of the period; (b) their efforts to negotiate the publication process; (c) the media used to disseminate women’s writing; and (d) the social and institutional means by which women’s writing was read and reviewed.
3. To survey the range of scholarly work that has been and is being done on Romantic women writers, including biography, bibliography, critical editions, essays and monographs, disseminated in both traditional print and digital media.
4. To develop research and writing skills, and specifically to gain experience in writing within a range of scholarly modes.

Together, we will also be building a bibliography of sources relevant to the course. This has already been begun (and will be available on Google docs). I will ask you to add all sources you use during this course to the bibliography.

Required Texts:

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview)

Anna Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose (Broadview)

Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women (Broadview)

Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria (Broadview)

Readings will be supplemented by PDF files; links to online sources have been provided.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Tentative Schedule:

September 10:

Women and Literary Production: Private and Social beginnings

Guest Visitor (via Skype): Isobel Grundy, Co-founder of Orlando and Professor, U. of Alberta

[Biography Assignment: Please read biographical entries on our eight authors -- Austen, Baillie, Barbauld, Hemans, Smith, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth in Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles, Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Biography. Please read the biographies of at least one author in each of the three sources, to ascertain which one you prefer. Be prepared to discuss why you preferred that source.]

• Austen, “The Beautifull Cassandra”; “A History of England”, from Volume the First and Volume the Second
• Baillie, “A Winter’s Day” and “A Summer’s Day,” from Poems, Wherein It Is Attempted To Describe Certain Views Of Nature And Of Rustic Manners (J. Johnson: London, 1790)
• Barbauld, “Address to the Deity” (41-44); “To Mrs P[riestley, with some Drawings of Birds and Insects” (44-48); “To Dr. Aikin on his Complaining that she neglected him, October 20 1768” (55-58); “The Groans of the Tankard” (83-86); “Summer Evening’s Meditation” (8-101)
• Hemans, “On My Mother’s Birthday”; “Address to the Deity”; “To My Brother and Sister, in the Country. Written in London”; “To My Brother” from Poems (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808).
• Charlotte Smith, “Sonnet XXXVII, Sent to the Honourable Mrs O’Niell, with Painted Flowers,” from Elegiac Sonnets (J. Johnson: London, 1780)
• Wordsworth, Alfoxden Journal, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. William Knight. New York: MacMillan, 1904. 3 vols. 3-18

Sept 17:

Getting into Print: Negotiating Publicity

• Austen, Northanger Abbey
• Barbauld, Poems (1773): A Hypertext Edition
• Hemans, Dedication, Advertisement, Subscribers, “Stanzas, Addressed to the Right Honorable Lady Viscountess Kirkwall” from Poems (1808)
• Smith, Dedication, Prefaces, Subscription List and Sonnets I-VI, IX, XII, XXXVI, XLII-XLV from Elegiac Sonnets (1789)
  • Jan Fergus, “The professional woman writer.” Eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 12-31.
  • Jennie Batchelor, “Somebody's story: Charlotte Smith and the work of writing,” Women's work: labour, gender, authorship, 1750-1830. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010.

September 24:

Digital Surrogates / Editions / Collections

Digital Collection Discussion: For this class, you will select one of the following digital collections to survey and review (contact me if you want to review a resource that is not listed).

• British Women Romantic Poets Project
• Brown University Women Writers Project
• Defining Gender 1450-1910: Five Centuries of Advice Literature Online
• Electronic Enlightenment
• Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO)
• Eighteenth Century Fiction
• Irish Women Poets of the Romantic Period
• John Johnson Collection: an Archive of Printed Ephemera
• Outsiders: The Afterlife of Shelley and Frankenstein (NYPL)
• Perdita Manuscripts
• Romanticism: Landscape, Life, Literature
• Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period

Reading:

• Barbauld, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793)
• Hemans, Poetess Archive
• Wollstonecraft, On Poetry, and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature (1798)
  • Margaret Ezell, “Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text.” Literature Compass, 7: 102–109

October 1:

[Review Assignment: Please find at least one contemporary review of a publication we have examined in this course – be prepared to discuss (1) how you found the review; and (2) what it reveals about the status of women’s writing at the time; and (3) its significance for our current understanding of the work in question.]

Addressing the Public I (Poetry)

• Aikin, Epistles on Women, 51-99
• Barbauld, “The Mouse’s Petition” (69-72); “Epistle to William Wilberforce” (121-126); Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (160-173)
• Hemans, “The Grave of a Poetess”; “The Homes of England”; “The Graves of a Household”; “The Image in Lava” from Records of Women, and other Poems
  • Mellor, “Theatre and the School of Virtue” and “Women’s Political Poetry” from Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (39-84).
  • Stauffer, Hemans by the Book 22:3 (2011) 373-380.

October 8: Thanksgiving – no class

October 15:

Addressing the Public II (the Novel)

• Austen, “Advertisement” and “Chapter 5,” Northanger Abbey
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction and Maria; Or the Wrongs of Women
  • Cheryl Turner, “Professional Women Novelists: Earning an Income.” Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. Taylor and Francis eLibrary, 2002. 102-126.
  • Jennie Batchelor, “The ‘business’ of a women's life and the making of the female philosopher: the works of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Women's work: labour, gender, authorship, 1750-1830. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010.

Oct 22:

[Monograph Reviews: For today’s class, we will all select one monograph to read, review and present to the class. Your presentation should be about 10-12 minutes in length. The monograph can be chosen from the course bibliography, or you can select another text. Please advise me of your choice by October 15 at the latest. I will review Jennie Batchelor’s Women's work: labour, gender, authorship, 1750-1830. You will post a copy of your review on the class blog.]

Addressing the Public III (the Drama)

• Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passions, 1-71; and Basil: A Tragedy, 72-192
  • Catherine Burroughs, “Joanna Baillie’s Theater of the Closet: Female Romantic Playwrights and Preface Writing.” Closet stages: Joanna Baillie and the theater theory of British romantic women writers. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997.
  • Jeffrey Cox, “Staging Baillie” in Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist. Ed. Thomas Crochunis. Taylor & Francis, 2003.

October 29:

Staying in Manuscript

• Austen, “Love and Friendship,” in Volume the Second
• Barbauld, “The Rights of Women” (130-131); “To the Poor” (139); “A Thought on Death” (175); “The Caterpillar” (179-180); “Thoughts on the Inequality of Condition” (343-355); “Letter from Grimalkin to Selima” (356-359)
• Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals, (129-159) and DCMS 20, 25, 19, 31, available on Romanticism: Landscape, Life, Literature
  • Z. Tenger and P. Trolander, “From Print versus Manuscript to Sociable Authorship and Mixed Media: A Review of Trends in the Scholarship of Early Modern Publication.” Literature Compass, 7: 1035–1048
  • Betty Schellenberg, “Bluestocking Women and the Negotiation of Oral, Manuscript, and Print Cultures” In J. Labbe (ed.), The History of British Women's Writing, 1750-1830 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan). 63-83.
  • Michelle Levy, “Austen’s Manuscripts and the Publicity of Print” ELH 77.4 (Winter 2010): 1015-1040.

November 5:

Anthologies/The Canon

[Anthology Assignment: For today’s class, we will look at how contemporary anthologies present women writers. There are (at least) two possible methodologies: one is to pick a given anthology with a history, such as the Norton, and find as many earlier versions as possible to trace the representation of a few female writers over time. Alternatively, you can pick a single author and see how she is represented in the following anthologies.

• Norton Anthology of English Literature
• Longman Anthology of English Literature
• Broadview Anthology of English Literature
• Mellor and Matlak, British Literature 1770-1830.
• Perkins, English Romantic Writers
• Backscheider, Paula R. and Caroline Ingrassia, eds. British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: an anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. [PR 1177 B756 2009]
• Devine, Harriet, ed. Women's writing of the romantic period, 1789-1836: an anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. [PR 1110 W6 W69 1997]
• Feldman, Paula, ed. British women poets of the Romantic era: an anthology. Manchester; New York: Manchester UP, 1994.

Reading

• Barbauld, “Essay on the Origins and Progress of Novel Writing,” British Novelists, 8-62
  • Claudia Johnson, “Let Me Make the Novels of the Country: Barbauld’s British Novelists (1810/1820)” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (34:2) (Spring, 2001): 163-179

November 12: Remembrance Day Holiday

November 19:

The Critical / Scholarly Edition

[Critical/Scholarly Edition Review: You are also to select a critical or scholarly edition, preferably on one of our authors but if not on a woman writer of the period — see bibliography for choices available – to review for the class. Please advise me of your choice by October 29 at the latest.]

Reading:

Please read (or reread) the critical introductions, chronologies, and appendices from our four Broadview editions and be prepared to discuss thescholarly apparatus that they include from a critical perspective.

November 26:

The (Early) Reception of Women’s Writing

• Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (Murray: London, 1818), v-xix
• Lucy Aikin, “Memoirs of Anna Barbauld,” Works of Anna Barbauld (Longman: London. 1825), 2 vols. I:v-lxii
• Lucy Aikin, “Recollections of Joanna Baillie,” online supplement to Epistles of Women and Other Works
• William Michael Rossetti, “Prefatory Notice,” The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans (Walker: London), xi-xxvii
• William Godwin, "Preface" to the Letters in Posthumous Works (1798), 306-310
  • Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Certainly not a Female Pen’: Felicia Hemans's Early Public Reception” in Felicia Hemans: reimagining poetry in the nineteenth century. Ed. Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011.
  • William McCarthy, “A ‘High-Minded Christian Lady’: The Posthumous Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld.” Romanticism and women poets: opening the doors of reception. Ed. Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Final Paper/ Project Proposal and Annotated Bibliography Due

December 3:

Conference Proposals / Mini-Conference Presentations

[For today’s class, everyone will prepare an abstract based on a CFP (call for papers) (preferably related to the course theme and using work done in the class). You will bring the actual CFP and your abstract to class and we will have a peer review session in which we read each other’s proposals. You will then submit the abstract to me for feedback.]

[You will also be presenting your work on your final paper or project – exact framework/details to be determined based on how your research develops, however, I expect that I will group your papers into panels, and that you will present a 10-12 min talk on your final projects, to be followed by questions.]

Overview of Important Dates:

September 10: Biography Assignment & Professor Isobel Grundy via Skype

September 24: Visit from Dr. Laura Estill, UVic & Discussion of Digital Collections

October 1: Review Assignment

October 8: Thanksgiving – No Class

October 22: Monograph Review

November 5: Anthology Assignment

November 12: Remembrance Day Holiday – No Class

November 19: Print Scholarly/Critical Edition Review

November 26: Final Paper/ Project Proposal and Annotated Bibliography Due

December 3: CFP Abstract & Presentation on Final Paper / Project

December 10: Final Paper / Project due