Introduction: Women, Professionalisation, and Patronage

The study of women’s writing has become a lively field that has contributed and given rise to many new directions in the broader field of literary studies. Some of these, most importantly the ‘material turn’, have fuelled the theme of this volume: economic imperatives for women’s writing. In the past three decades, with the greater availability of public records and archival materials, literary historians have tended to consider material aspects in their literary analyses and, as such, their collaboration with book historians has increased. Topics such as patronage and professionalism have burgeoned and moneymaking has been put on the agenda as an important factor within the literary field. Material culture has contributed an invaluable framework for analysing a wealth of data regarding women’s lives and works. The material turn was conceived in part as a scholarly interest in any aspect related to the business of writing that affected women’s authorship and, thereby, scholars of women’s literature have invoked it in many ways to enrich the scope of their inquiries. Nevertheless, the theme of moneymaking did not especially fit within this material subdomain.1 The socially inferior position of women and the rhetoric of modesty in their writing led to a predominant focus on social rather than economic imperatives for women’s writing. This blind spot affects scholarship about women’s writing across the European continent, although the focus on the production and consumption of women’s literature in material terms has led to the identification and study of many English professional women writers from the eighteenth century. With regard to economic imperatives for women’s writing, two important facts have often been disregarded or overlooked. These animate the purpose of this work: that women’s socially inferior position was not a decisive limiting factor in their creative and professional