Women Writers and Their Publishers

Making the Printed Book, 1770-1830
Erscheinungsjahr 2027
ISBN: 978-1-009-84535-9
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

Examining the period during which women's participation in literary marketplaces soared, Michelle Levy expands understandings of female authorship, moving beyond exceptional women writing in the major genres; of book trades, by tracing the importance of profit sharing and limited sale of copyright, by which authors benefited from reprinting; and of book history, by addressing the pervasive influence of gender on book culture during the long eighteenth century. Through detailed analysis of surviving publishers' archives and correspondence, she convincingly argues that women were actively involved in all decisions relating to the production, marketing, circulation, and reception of their books. Women in fact wrote not merely texts but books: they drafted with attention to the shape their writing would take in book form and were directly involved in the processes by which their words were transformed into material and commercial objects. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levy, Michelle

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: From Women's Literary History to Women's Book History; 1. Finding Women in Publishers' Archives; 2. Women Corresponding with Cadell & Davies; 3. John Murray's Pursuit of Women of Letters; 4. Women Writers Selling Copyright to Longman and Bentley; 5. Women Writers Sharing Profits with Longman and Bentley; 6. Marketing Women's Books: Title Pages, Advertisements, Catalogues, Prefaces; 7. Reselling Women's Writing: Works, Collections, Anthologies, Series; Coda; Notes; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Levy, Michelle
Michelle Levy is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of two monographs, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (2008) and Literary Manuscript Culture in Romantic Britain (2020), co-author with Betty A. Schellenberg of the Cambridge Element How and Why to do things with Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts (2021), author of two text books, The Broadview Reader in Book History (2015) and The Broadview Introduction to Book History (2017), editor of Dorothy Wordsworth's Lake District (2024), and, with Anne K. Mellor, co-editor of Lucy Aikin's Epistles on Women and other Works (2010). She also directs The Women's Print History Project, a publicly available database that collects detailed information, at the edition level, on women's books for the long eighteenth century.