A guide to British women authors, their works, and the writing about them.

British Women's Life Writing, 1760-1840 brings together for the first time a wide range of print and manuscript sources to demonstrate women's innovative approach to self-representation. It examines canonical writers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Helen Maria Williams, amongst others.

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser finds that far from fading into moribund old age, female literary greats such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catharine Macaulay, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Jane Porter toiled for decades after they achieved acclaim -- despite seemingly concerted attempts by literary gatekeepers to marginalize their later contributions. Though these remarkable women wrote and published well into old age, Looser sees in their late careers the necessity of choosing among several different paths. These included receding into the background as authors of "classics," adapting to grandmotherly standards of behavior, attempting to reshape masculinized conceptions of aged wisdom, or trying to create entirely new categories for older women writers. In assessing how these writers affected and were affected by the culture in which they lived, and in examining their varied reactions to the prospect of aging, Looser constructs careful portraits of each of her Subjects and explains why many turned toward retrospection in their later works. In illuminating the powerful and often poorly recognized legacy of the British women writers who spurred a marketplace revolution in their earlier years only to find unanticipated barriers to acceptance in later life, Looser opens up new scholarly territory in the burgeoning field of feminist age studies.

This collection discusses British and Irish life writings by women in the period 1700-1850. It argues for the importance of women's life writing as part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography, exploring the complex relationships between constructions of femininity, life writing forms and models of authorship.

Until recently, history writing has been understood as a male enclave from which women were restricted, particularly prior to the 19th century. This work takes a look at British women writers and their contributions to historiography during the long 18th century. It asks why, rather than writing history that included their own sex, some women of this period chose to write the same kind of history as men -one that marginalized or excluded women altogether. But as Devoney Looser demonstrates, although British women's historically informed writings were not necessarily feminist or even female-focused, they were intimately involved in debates over and conversations about the genre of history.

A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.