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.

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.

Andrew O. Winckles is Assistant Professor of CORE Curriculum (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Adrian College. Angela Rehbein is Associate Professor of English at West Liberty University.

The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.

Frances Sheridan’s Eugenia and Adelaide is an astonishing first novel of parental tyranny, infidelity, kidnap, blackmail, and violence played out over two volumes against the backdrop of continental Europe. The friendship of Eugenia and Adelaide endures in spite of their separation at the beginning of the novel and remains central to a complex yet coherently drawn web of intriguing tales situated in palatial apartments and remote moss-covered castles. Drawing upon the tragic and comic possibilities of disguise familiar to her from Shakespearean and Restoration drama, and influenced by the romantic entanglements of early prose fiction, Sheridan adopts a sometimes satirical approach to extraordinary events at the same time that she demonstrates a sincere and convincing commitment to the ingenious art of storytelling. Sheridan completed the novel in 1739 when she was just fifteen-years old and Eugenia and Adelaide would prove instrumental to the establishing of Sheridan’s literary reputation as one of the most successful novelists and dramatists of the mid-eighteenth century. This is the first modern edition of Eugenia and Adelaide to be published since the original posthumous publication of 1791 and presents a unique opportunity to explore Sheridan’s contribution to our current understandings of the history of women’s writing, and of reading tastes and practices in the long eighteenth century.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Marguerite Blessington, who had been born in Ireland but spent most of her life in London, became a famous salonnière; she was generally regarded as an important contemporary author, but as no literary executor took care of her oeuvre posthumously, she eventually moved into the background. Her novels, partly informed by the silver-fork genre, are typical examples of Romantic Victorianism, influenced by the Romantic cult of the solitary male self, by the fascination with Italy, and by the 1840s vogue of crime fiction, while simultaneously giving space to ambivalent reflections about Blessington’s own Irish background. This volume, as part of ‘Chawton House Library: Women’s Novels’ series, presents her 1847 novel Marmaduke Herbert; or, the Fatal Error, a highly popular piece of fiction in its day, being reprinted in German, French and American editions within a year of its publication.

This collection of essays links current research in the writings and editing of early modern women and in those women who were themselves early editors with a new methodology of editing currently titled “the new textualism.” As such, the collection seeks to solve two problems. The first concerns the difficulty of editing the works of early modern women writers for whom there is little biographical data, a challenging task when the standard “life and works” format is thus inhibited. Second, related but slightly different, occurs because, although we know that there were women who edited in the early modern and even later periods, we know little about them as well. The new textualism approach to editing, which focuses on the material properties of the manuscript or book, its print or performance history and records of its dissemination, and the sociology of texts, provides a fruitful solution to both problems by broadening the concept of agency and hence provides a richer context for the production of a given text. The collection includes two sets of essays. One set has been reprinted from seminal works in the field of new textualism. These include writings by recognized figures like Jerome McGann, Leah Marcus, and Wendy Wall, among others. As such, that set provides background for the reading of the second, a group of six original essays by scholars now working in the field of early modern women writers who directly apply aspects of the new textualism in their research. The fusion of the research field of retrieving early modern women writers with the practices of new textualist editing is thus the core of this collection of essays and is illustrative of what can be achieved in the field of editing when this new approach to texts is put into practice.