‘Your Fourier’s Failed’

This chapter traces the affective forces at work in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s representation of utopian socialist Charles Fourier in Aurora Leigh (1855). In Barrett Browning’s verse-novel, “Fourier” operates as a sign mediated by networks of affect, referring not only to the political struggles surrounding socialism in the 1850s but also to Barrett Browning’s personal psychoanalytic conflicts against both her father and her own queer desires (particularly, for George Sand). Thus, “Fourier” functions as a nodal point in Aurora Leigh where a political crisis and the author’s individual psychological needs meet to produce a dismissal of the economic and social alternatives that were available at that historical moment and the forms of queer identity that challenged the heteronormative, liberal order.

The Female Authors of Cadell and Davies

This chapter explores the publishing firm of Cadell and Davies and its relationships with its female authors. During the seven decades in which it operated, in various incarnations between 1765 and 1836, the firm published many influential female authors of the period, including Fanny Burney, Hannah Cowley, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Maria Williams. Through a careful examination of the surviving correspondence and the bibliographical history of their publications of women's writing, this chapter engages in a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the firm’s business practices and women’s engagement with the commercial world of print. The print networks described in the chapter emphasize the centralized position, and asymmetrical power, that male publishers held within a marketplace abundant with female writers seeking to print their works.

Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick

This chapter explores the cultural and literary importance of a little-known network of women writers in the Midlands – significance which is rooted in, but extends far beyond, their local setting. Focussing on two Leicester writers and friends, the abolitionist and animal rights campaigners Susanna Watts (c.1768 - 1842) and Elizabeth Heyrick, née Coltman (1769-1831) it gives an insight into the rich culture of provincial women and restores a range of female voices to our understanding of Midlands society, religion, literature and reform. Collaboratively written itself, this chapter explores and contextualises collaborative practices, emphasising the importance of local community, worship, and friendship. While Heyrick, Watts and their circle should be seen as part of a larger anti-slavery network operating in the period, it is also important to recognise the subtle differences between groups which complicate our idea of the collective female voice in the period.

The Citational Network of Tighe, Porter, Barbauld, Lefanu, Morgan, and Hemans

This essay looks at five Romantic-era women writers who invoke Mary Tighe in their works by name, quotation, or epigraph--Anna Maria Porter, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Alicia Lefanu, Lady Morgan, and Felicia Hemans--to consider what these invocations suggest about lines of affiliation, the construction of aesthetic communities, and attempts to shape or forecast reception. It argues that these woman writers create a citational network through the figure and work of Mary Tighe, to call attention to her significance and therein establish their own histories of influence and reception. Their citational practices produce a more expansive version of what Gerard Genette designates the ‘epigraph effect’ in Paratexts, affording opportunities for writers to signal their place in a cultural tradition, to acknowledge or choose their peers and predecessors, and to proleptically instantiate their consecration in a particular literary pantheon. They effectively create a canon of their own by building citational networks.

Sisters of the Quill

This chapter traces the formation of a literary network of “evangelical bluestockings” in Regency England who yearned for the Bluestocking community of the past, but were constrained and frustrated by changing social, literary, intellectual, and religious landscapes of the present. These women, including Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Benger, Marianne Francis, and Elizabeth Hamilton, used a diverse set of mediation practices (including manuscript production and circulation) to create an intellectual community oriented around evangelical religion. This chapter ultimately argues that evangelical religion and theology offered a way for these latter day Bluestockings to deal with the shifting social, cultural, and artistic conditions of turn of the century Britain and that the literary networks which coalesced around their shared religious interests represented a significant means through which literary women formed, expressed, and published their ideas.

Afterword

While the individual essays in this collection each examine a particular aspect of women’s literary networks during the Romantic period, when taken as a whole, larger patterns begin to emerge and invite further exploration. Broadly speaking, these patterns might be organized according to five tentative claims: (1) networks led to a densely interconnected Romantic world; (2) manuscript letters and life writing were vital parts of literary networks and deserve re-examination as literature; (3) men were an important part of women’s literary networks, but not necessarily in all the ways we have come to expect; (4) women used networks to become active in political, social, and religious causes and debates from which they were otherwise excluded; and (5) women’s networks were intergenerational and trouble easy distinctions between literary periods....

Mary Shelley and Sade’s Global Network

Since the 1930s, critics have assumed that Frankenstein’s allusions to Donatien-Antoine-François Sade's controversial novel Justine are somehow accidental. This essay contends that Mary Shelley in fact had profound knowledge not necessarily of Justine, but of Sade’s tale ‘Eugénie de Franval’, which concludes his multivolume compilation Les Crimes de l’amour(1800). This tale anticipates many aspects of Mary Shelley’s two earliest novels, Frankenstein and Mathilda; too many to be ‘coincidental’. The ‘Eugénie de Franval’ character Monsieur Clervil anticipates Frankenstein’s Henry Clerval, while Mathilda can be read as a variation on ‘Eugénie de Franval’. Mary Shelley’s debt to Sade complicates the longstanding interpretation of his nineteenth-century global network of literary protégés as a gentleman’s club and reveals a great deal about her performance as a reader and self-fashioning as an author.

Ageing, Authorship, and Female Networks in the Life Writing of Mary Berry (1763–1852) and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851)

This chapter examines older women’s literary friendships in the context of critical narratives of ageing, authorship, and gender, as depicted in the correspondence and (auto)biographical writing of Joanna Baillie and Mary Berry. These works reveal creative and collaborative exchanges, relationships with writers (both from their own generation and the next), interactions with publishers and booksellers, anxieties of reception, the pleasures and pains of ageing, and their commitment to continued publication into late life. In addition to studies of Romanticism and old age, conversely, reading literary networks and social authorship through the lens of ageing brings into sharper focus intra- and intergenerational connections and locates Berry and Baillie within and beyond Romantic literary culture. Furthermore, extending the analysis of life writing materials to include the biographical prefaces, obituaries, and collective biographies that followed the deaths of Baillie and Berry helps us to refigure the enduring literary legacies of these authors.

Introduction

This chapter broadly outlines how the networking practices of Romanticism created unique spaces for communities of women and their literary activities. In particular, it traces the ways that women used literary networks and how these networks influenced the ways that they thought about their own identities and their identities in relation to others. Furthermore, it tracks how the protocols and norms that structured these literary networks were reflected in these women’s lives and relationships specifically, and then more broadly in the literary culture of the period by first examining networks of association or interest (groups of actual women who corresponded with and worked in community with each other), and then by turning to networks of meaning, within which authors and texts that may not traditionally seem to have any connection with each other interacted and spoke in unexpected ways. The approach allows for a more nuanced view of how networks formed and functioned during the Romantic period.

Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists

This chapter reexamines Maria Edgeworth’s relationship to Thomas Day through the lens of her intended first publication of de Genlis and of Edgeworth’s careful engagement with his Sandford and Merton to demonstrate that Edgeworth rejected perceived essential association between women and emotion or intellectual inferiority and that she denied domestic utility in arguments on behalf of a woman’s education that went beyond the typical feminine accomplishments. In addition, Edgeworth targeted Mary Wollstonecraft’s endorsement of Day through her deliberate 1798 revision of Letters for Literary Ladies and its invocation of Wollstonecraft’s ‘rights,’ exemplifying the potential for women writers to speak to their peers, both women and men, while they negotiated the business of eighteenth-century publishing.