Reviewing Femininity: Gender and Genre in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
Pam Perkins examines the role played by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century periodicals in both demarcating and blurring contemporary ideas around feminine writing. The essay provides an overview of critical attitudes about women’s writing and the way it was treated in major Romantic-era periodicals (the Edinburgh Review, British Critic, Anti-Jacobin), and then complicates this picture with case studies in the receptions of the writers Anne Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton, whose work pushed back against traditional generic tendencies. Both were praised, surprisingly, for being innovators as well as for evincing proper femininity. Their visibility in the print media of their own day helped to normalise the concept of female authorship, and urges us to re-examine modern critical understandings of the role that periodicals played in early Romantic norms for gendered writing.