Romantic Women and their Books

Abstract

This special issue of studies in romanticism, “Romantic Women and their Books,” takes its origin from a shared conviction that the intersecting circles of gender studies, book history, and Romanticism should be pushed closer together, creating more overlapping spaces in that Venn diagram. Nearly thirty years ago, Anne Mellor asked, “What difference does gender make to our understanding of literary Romanticism?” The field rose to answer in an outpouring of recovery work and theoretical reframing that profoundly changed the ways we teach and publish on the Romantic era. Around the same time, Jerome McGann was challenging Romanticists with versions of the question, “What difference do the circumstances of publication make to the interpretation of a literary work?” In the decades that followed, book history and critical bibliography have assumed new prominence in Romantic studies as methods for investigating literary media cultures. In gathering essays for this issue, we asked authors to consider a hybrid of the Mellor-McGann provocations: what difference does a doubled lens of gender and book history make to our understanding of Romantic writing? Or, as we asked in the call for papers, “What do we gain, and what might we lose, by resituating Romantic women’s writing and their literary labor within new frameworks of material and bibliographic histories?” In 1993, Mellor began to document the different preoccupations of women writers, many of whom did not share the investments of male poets in transcendence and the imagination, but rather advocated for rationality, equality, and an “ethic of care.” Mellor asserted that because scholarly conceptions of the field were based on a small selection of male poets, our “descriptions of that historical phenomenon we call Romanticism are unwittingly gender-biased.” In his 1998 study, The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin developed a theory