Editing Women's Writing, 1670-1840

Amy Culley, Anna M. Fitzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351586023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

This edited volume is the first to reflect on the theory and practice of editing women's writing of the 18th century. The list of contributors includes experts on the fiction, drama, poetry, life-writing, diaries and correspondence of familiar and lesser known women, including Jane Austen, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood and Mary Robinson. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings not only of the woman writer and women's literary history, but also of our own editorial practice.

1 Introduction

Editing women’s writing, 1670–1840

Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer

This volume of scholarly essays reflects upon the practice and theory of editing women’s writing of the long eighteenth century, presenting distinctive insights into projects dedicated to the ongoing recovery of women’s literary history and offering new perspectives on textual encounters between author, editor and reader. The volume was inspired by a roundtable at the conference, ‘Pride & Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century’, which took place at Chawton House Library in 2013. The conversation has since widened to include contributors who have edited volumes of women’s writing from across the long eighteenth century, ranging in scope from editions of Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood to the writing of Sarah Harriet Burney. Our editors reflect upon fiction, poetry, drama, correspondence, journals, memoirs, periodicals, roman à clefs and historical fiction, published in both print and electronic forms from 2001 to the present. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively, these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings, not only of the woman writer and women’s literary history, but also of our own editorial practice. In particular, our editors engage with issues central to the recovery project, including the complexities of gender and genre, models of female authorship, the relationship between women’s lives and texts, and women’s place within the literary tradition. Thinking in this context about what might be different about editing women writers, we can review our responsibilities, and explore future directions for editing women at a time when digitization projects and electronic databases continue to transform our interaction with writing from the past.

There has been substantial expansion in the publication of modern reprints and scholarly editions of eighteenth-century texts by women, produced over the last decades for a general and academic readership. These developments have helped to challenge women’s position as ‘second-class citizens of the republic of letters’, to borrow Marilyn Butler’s evocative terms.¹ The publishing initiatives of second-wave feminism declared a commitment to the promotion and improved circulation of women writers in a history informed by ideological and commercial imperatives.² Virago, perhaps the most well-known press dedicated to female-authored texts, was established in 1973 by Carmen Callil and, through its Modern Classics series, conferred renewed status upon women writers predominantly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Works encompassing fiction and non-fiction included new introductions, many contributed by practising women writers. Between 1986 and 1989 Virago made a significant step in the recovery of writing by women of our period, beginning with reprints of Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) which, with an introduction by Jane Spencer, was ‘the first reissue […] since the eighteenth century.’³ Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–1687) followed in 1987, and finally Austen’s six novels – all of which were introduced by Margaret Drabble. Though by the early 1980s Virago had desisted with ‘the clarion call that had initially heralded each title – “Virago is a feminist company”’ – Lorna Stevens observes that ‘as a publishing house it resurrected, rediscovered, marketed and published, with commendable aplomb “women’s writing”, both past and present, and in so doing it has made a significant contribution to women’s rich yet often obscured literary and intellectual heritage.’⁴ If it became less overtly polemical than other presses and women’s magazines established in this period, Virago’s mutually effective processes of selection and promotion made women’s writing of the past accessible in affordable paperback editions to a broad readership.

Virago’s excursion into early women’s writing coincided with the emergence of ‘Reprint fiction from the Pandora Press’, the comparatively modest descriptor for Mothers of the Novel, a series of twenty reset novels covering the period 1749–1834. One of the earliest of these was Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751, 1986), introduced by Dale Spender. Spender’s influential monograph, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (Pandora, 1986), was advertised as a companion to the series which, between 1986 and 1989, called upon other women writers and scholars, including Jeanette Winterson, Fay Weldon and Janet Todd, to contribute short introductions. The suggestion of a dialogue between women editors and their eighteenth-century forbears was a concept Sue Townsend cleverly adapted to her own introduction to Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761, 1987). Writing it as a ‘Fan Letter to a Dead Writer’, Townsend is directly addressing Sheridan with all the disarming frankness of her own fictional diarist, Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (though he would have been aged 20¾ by 1987), while conveying to other grown-up readers the principal, and often challenging aspects of Sheridan’s short life. Pandora Press did not quite publish the 100 novels in its sights, but it did enable ‘many people and many academic and public libraries to acquire the works of Austen’s teachers’, and made way for their inclusion on taught courses.⁵

This impetus to make available early women writers was at the same time shared by both feminist scholars, committed to challenging the canon of eighteenth-century literary studies, and scholarly publishers, for whom a comprehensive editorial apparatus was a priority. Pickering & Chatto have been leaders in the production of extensively annotated editions since the 1980s when the emphasis centred upon the re-publication of writers of the Romantic period and later nineteenth century. The seven-volume Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Butler and Todd (1989), and Todd’s The Works of Aphra Behn (1992–1996) were early interventions in the publisher’s Pickering Masters, which further represented women in a series focused upon the published correspondence, and collected works of authors in multi-volume sets. Its editions of Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley amongst others, complemented individual volumes included in Pickering Women’s Classics, a series also established in the 1990s and edited by Todd. Encompassing a diversity of genres – poems, novels, biography and translations – it ranged across the seventeenth- eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries for its selection of lesser-known titles by familiar and neglected women writers.

Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women was a series founded in this period and edited by Isobel Grundy for the University Press of Kentucky. Though more focused in its remit, it would also cover the long eighteenth century (1680–1830) with print editions of ten works from such as Mary Davys, Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Brooke and Charlotte Smith, complete with explanatory endnotes and lists of emendations. Fine scholarly volumes available in paperback, these were designed as good student copies which, along with Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics, made a broad range of eighteenth-century female and male writers increasingly accessible. Broadview Press, an independent academic publisher established in 1985, has also developed an impressively wide-ranging catalogue. Broadview Editions currently include titles by at least thirty-five female novelists and dramatists of our period and, in addition to under-represented female voices, the publisher can make good claim to establishing across multiple volumes a particular author’s body of work. From Margaret Cavendish and Susan Centlivre, to Mary Hays and Mary Shelley, writers are presented in the context of the relevant historical extracts typically incorporated in each volume.

Pickering & Chatto’s commitment to the recovery in print of rare and undervalued texts was developed in its inauguration of the Chawton House Library Series in 2007. Pickering & Chatto’s partnership with Chawton House Library, an independent research library and study centre (and formerly the home of Austen’s brother, Edward), aimed to enhance the scope and range of writing by and about women in the long eighteenth century through three strands: Women’s Novels; Women’s Memoirs; and Women’s Travel Writing. This has since been extended to include a fourth strand: Scholarly Editing. Such attention to a variety of authors and modes of writing has served to promote enquiry into the interrelation of women writers beyond the parameters of chronology or genre, by which their significance or contribution might otherwise be defined. Such projects complement the achievements of works in the field which have recently re-focused attention upon literary correspondence and manuscripts to a greater extent.⁶ The scholarly edition’s dual emphasis upon making available a text which is further variously discovered through extensive editorial annotation and introductions, headnotes and details of textual variants, advances our understanding of women’s literary cultures and enables fresh insights into their networks and coteries. Clearly, much has been done since the mid-1990s to answer Butler’s call that: ‘we must have true scholarly editions of a significant body of women’s writing, not only to grasp the internal dynamics of an individual career, but to understand its group dynamics, its inter-relations with society and history.’⁷

When Butler’s essay ‘Editing Women’ was published in 1995, innovations in electronic editions were taking shape. In 1996, Chadwyck-Healey’s CD-Rom Eighteenth-Century Fiction – since made available online – announced access to a full-text, searchable database of a selection of novels published between 1700 and 1780 and included, amongst its thirty authors, women writers such as Manley and Haywood, as well as Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan and Clara Reeve. Haywood, who appears twice as a novelist in Kentucky’s Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, is also doubly recognized – in an edition of her fiction and drama, and in another dedicated to The Female Spectator – as part of Women Writers in English 1350–1850, published by Oxford University Press. This print publication, replete with full introductions and concise footnotes, represents novels, poetry, drama, correspondence and other non-fiction across fifteen volumes derived from Brown University’s highly innovative Women Writers Project. Established in 1988, and now operating from Northeastern University, the project’s adoption of early technologies in digital transcription in the creation of a full-text database, and harnessing of developments in text encoding, led to the launch in 1999 of Women Writers Online.

Thomson Gale’s 2004 Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, as a full-text, fully searchable successor to Early English Books Online, has enabled the further contextualization of women’s writing, boasting in excess of 150,000 titles published across a range of disciplines between 1701 and 1800. Furthermore, the database, British Fiction 1800–1829, draws upon the Corvey collection, which comprises titles published mainly between 1796 and 1834, and the facsimile Corvey Microfiche Edition has formed the basis of Corvey Women Writers on the Web. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, exemplifies continued scholarly commitment to the creation of a digital history through which both print and online editions might be further understood.

Access to resources such as ECCO and Orlando, for example, is made possible through subscription, and the relative expense is more likely to be met by university libraries and research institutions than general readers. In this respect, the reach of searchable online full-text databases of women’s writing is commensurate with that of the scholarly print edition, though these do typically aspire to the objectives outlined by Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman, General Editors of Women Writers in English 1350–1850. Editions in this series aim

at a wide audience, from the informed undergraduate through professional students of literature, and they attempt to include the general reader who is interested in exploring a fuller tradition of early texts in English than has been available through the almost exclusively male canonical tradition.⁸

This tentative step toward the democratization of access to rare texts, has, however, arguably been achieved more fully by a different kind of enterprise in the form of, amongst others, Google Books and Internet Archive. Readers in almost any location can view a digital image and, in the case of archive.org, turn the pages of a virtual book. Such digital facsimiles generate opportunities for the ‘general reader’ to engage in that ‘fuller tradition’, although not, in all cases, with reference to the extensive editorial apparatus which print and sophisticated online editions additionally provide.⁹

The extent to which ‘particular editions’ have ‘particular purposes and particular audiences’ is an issue that Isobel Grundy raised over twenty years ago, as editor of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Grundy’s expected audience for Montagu’s Complete Letters was ‘the users of reference libraries’ whose needs she privileged in her approach to annotation. Nonetheless, Grundy argues that ‘private people and common readers […] deserve a correct, authentic text just as much as library users do’.¹⁰ The ways in which particular editions make texts accessible to new audiences and challenge the traditional canon have been discussed in more recent times by Stuart Curran, who provides an alternative perspective to Grundy in emphasizing our responsibilities to an author as well as to her readers. In an essay comparing electronic media and print editions in the twenty-first century, Curran acknowledges that text databases ‘constitute an overwhelming affront to an historical, arbitrarily reified, and implicitly sexist canon’. But in turning to his experiences as General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto fourteen-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith (2005–2007), he contends that while the burgeoning in Smith scholarship was dependent upon the ‘breadth’ of ‘availability’ of her work ‘in electronic textbases’, nonetheless the scholarly print edition was ‘essential’ to Smith’s ‘cultural grounding’ and recovery of her literary reputation.¹¹

It is in considering the implications of enhanced accessibility to books and their authors, that, in the first essay of our collection, Lorna J. Clark reiterates the importance of the editor-as-guide. In this capacity, editors enable the reader to appreciate the particul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: editing women’s writing, 1670–1840
• 2 An ambitious and quixotic series: the ever-shifting role of the editor and the Chawton House Library Series
• 3 Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): making (and unmaking) a periodical ‘for women’
• 4 Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality
• 5 Annotating Delarivier Manley: stripping away preconceptions of gender and genre
• 6 Julie and Julia: tracing intertextuality in Helen Maria Williams’s novel
• 7 Romancing the past: women’s historical fiction, editorial pains and practices
• 8 A ‘Piece written by a Lady’: gender, anonymous authorship and editing The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760)
• 9 ‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?: editing women’s court memoirs
• 10 ‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’: editing women in the Chawton House Library Series
• 11 Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters in twenty-five volumes
• 12 ‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’: the rationale for a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters
• Selected works cited
• Index