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The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

Norma Clarke

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Paperback

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English
Pimlico
01 July 2004
While many nineteenth-century women writers - such as George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, the Brontes - are now widely written about, the women who paved the way for them in the eighteenth-century are only now being given the attention they deserve.

If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men- Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869.

The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century.

Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.
By:  
Imprint:   Pimlico
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 153mm,  Spine: 28mm
Weight:   518g
ISBN:   9780712664677
ISBN 10:   071266467X
Pages:   320
Publication Date:  
Recommended Age:   From 0 years
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Undergraduate ,  Primary
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Educated at the Universities of Lancaster, London, and Kent, Norma Clarke is a Research Fellow in the English Department, Kingston University, and an Honorary Research Fellow in the History Department, Royal Holloway College, University of London. She is the author of five novels for children, numerous articles and several books, including Ambitious Heights (1990) and, with Helen Weinstein, Spinning with the Brain (1996).

Reviews for The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters

A book of subtlety and distinction, a reminder of just how far feminist literary scholarship has come * Guardian * This book achieves far more than the rehabilitation of forgotten authors... Instead, she investigates the broader mechanisms of fame, the formation of authorial personae, and the mysterious reasons why some names rise while others fall...This is a subtle, persuasive and engrossing study * Independent * Inspirational...reveals a rich history of literary women who not only made a living from writing but were treated as the equals of their male peers... [It] should be a set textbook in English classes * Herald *


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