General Introduction From Romantic Women Writers Reviewed

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Romantic Women Writers Reviewed(RWWR) is a work o recuperation. ypi-

cally that word designates eorts to bring orgotten texts by women back intoview so that scholars and critics may revalue them. Tis is not the purpose othis edition, except incidentally. Certainly, in the cases o no-longer-extant textsby women, the extracts provided by contemporary reviewers act as our only evi-dence o the lost original; and in those cases,RWWR does indirectly recuperatethat original. But the primary purpose o this edition is to bring to light thelargely buried critical reception o women writers.

Editions o the critical reception o male authors have been in print since atleast the late 1960s. For example, the long-running Critical Heritage series vol-umes o selective edited contemporary reviews boasted 104 volumes. But onlyeight o these volumes were devoted to the critical heritage o women authors:

Jane Austen (2 volumes); the Bronts; Elizabeth Gaskell; George Eliot; VirginiaWool; and Sylvia Plath. Te collective title o the series and its choice o authorssuggested that the critical heritage belongs almost exclusively to men. Even i

we narrow our ocus to the Romantic period, the same pattern applies, withvolumes on twelve male authors (William Blake; George Gordon, Lord Byron;Robert Burns; John Clare; Arthur Hugh Clough; S. . Coleridge; GeorgeCrabbe; John Keats; Walter Scott; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Robert Southey; Wil-liam Wordsworth) and one woman, Jane Austen. Te implication was clear:

women in the Romantic period other than Austen had little criticalimpor-tance. And that term critical cut both ways, suggesting the women were o aslittle interest to the modern scholars who were the audiences o the volumes asto the contemporary critics who had ignored them in commentaries. From the

Critical Heritage series, no one could know that Elizabeth Inchbalds or MaryRobinsons contemporary reviews would fll more than a volume each.

Te impression that women had little or no critical heritage was reinorced,however inadvertently, by Donald Reimans 1972 Te Romantics Reviewed:Contemporary Reviews o British Romantic Writers, 17931824. Reimans valu-able acsimile edition in nine big volumes elides womens reception almostentirely. Reimans work oers comprehensive coverage o fve male writers as

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well as selective coverage o another seven men and one woman, Mary Shel-ley. Te title, TeRomantics Reviewed, however, implies to the unwary that the

volumes oer ull coverage o the period; and the contents, by including only onewoman, encouraged readers to assume that womens works were not signifcantlyreviewed in the periodical press. By oering such reviews in handy acsimile, Rei-mans work also made the hard job o tracking down reviews less appealing: orcritics who were working not on reviews themselves but on the major authorsthey illuminated, Reimans work oered handy one-stop shopping, necessary orthose working without convenient access to nineteenth-century periodicals.

Certainly its not Reimans ault that scholars seem largely to overlook the

vast contents indexed in William Wards our-volumeLiterary Reviews in BritishPeriodicals, 17881826. Rather, to Reiman we owe the publication o Wardswork. As Richard Havens notes in his review o Ward, Reiman drew rom Wardsunpublished bibliography or the years 17981820 when developing his series.Tis allowed Reiman to move rom proposal to publication in only our years,a avour Reiman repaid by recommending Wards work to his own publisher.1

Wards bibliography was published in three instalments: two volumes in 1972,covering the years 17981820, listed 17,000 reviews; a third volume, 18216,

published in 1977, listed around 9,000 entries; and a fnal volume in 1979, cov-ering 178897, listed roughly 8,000 entries. Tough Ward excluded newspapers,except or theExaminerand the Champion, his bibliography remains as Havensdescribed it in 1972 an impressive achievement.2

However, the trouble o an index (to borrow a phrase rom Byron) is thatew critics acknowledge the aid o bibliographical and other reerence tools intheir own works. As a result, evaluating Wards impact on the feld o Romanticstudies is almost impossible.3 Te scholarly invisibility, as Maura Ives describesit,4 o such bibliographical scholarship is strikingly apparent when one searchesor uses o Ward in the only tools humanities scholars have or tracking cita-tions: theArts and Humanities Citation Indexrecords only ten works which cite

Wards Literary Reviews; Google Books indicates another two, Google Scholaranother our. Yet we see Wards inuence in virtually every study that includesreviews, including those which cite only Reiman. Ward attempted to survey theull feld o Romantic journals, ultimately 134 magazines. Even Antonia For-sters 1997 Index to Book Reviews in England, 17751800does not supersede

Ward or the thirteen years the two indexes overlap: Forster limited her ocus tothe twenty-six most signifcant magazines, all o which were already indexed in

Ward. As a result, i a critic is quoting reviews and not citing Reimans acsimileedition, it is air to assume he or she used Ward as a guide.

With Wards bibliography in hand, Romanticists could glimpse the possibili-ties that working with periodicals oered to literary scholarship. Organized byauthor, with a separate section or anonymous works, Wards bibliography is an

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General Introduction xi

amazing eat, particularly given that he lacked any o the tools we now take soor granted: spreadsheets, database programmes, even word processing. He com-

piled his work without recourse to online library catalogues, such as Worldcat,Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), Google Books or the Inter-net Archive.5 Instead, Wards bibliographical tools consisted o card catalogues,union lists on microflm, notecards, mimeographs and achingly slow paper cor-respondence with librarians across the world. We have only begun to discoverthe woeul incompleteness o his bibliography, but Ward himsel hints at the actin the preace to his frst volume:

most o the materials were gathered or a particular purpose a number o years ago.

At that time my principal interest was in the criticism o poetry in British periodicals,though I did take notes on the locations o reviews and non-review articles on fction,on drama, and on criticism, as well as on poetry.6

And again, in the preace to the third volume, Ward makes clear that his work asa bibliographer had come upon him unawares:

had I known more than fve years ago when I was putting materials together or thetwo volumes that cover the years 17981820, that I would, as Byron says, seize thetheme again (this time in retirement) I might have delayed publication.7

I make this apologia or Ward because, or all the aults o his index (and thereare many), which o us, in similar circumstances, would even have undertaken

the task?Te defciencies o Wards index in part arise rom its origin in personal

research notes not intended or publication. Ward shortens titles o magazines,expecting readers to expand that shorthand with reerence to his 1953 Index

and Finding List o Serials Published in the British Isles, 17891832 . But whenpreparing hisLiterary Reviews or publication, apparently even Ward did notveriy his shortened titles against the ull ones in hisIndex and Finding Aid. Asa result, one oen fnds several magazines with very similar titles in the Index,any o which might be reasonably reerred to by the shortened title provided in

Literary Reviews, and Ward oers no help in determining which periodical hemeant. He might not have even known.

Nor does Ward indicate how thoroughly he reviewed each issue o each

periodical. In at least one case, he reproduced an error present in a magazines yearly index to contents, suggesting that he might have or some years osome magazines relied on printed end-o-year indexes or monthly tables ocontents, rather than on a page-by-page review o the actual contents. Whilethe Monthly Review charged purchasers or the end-o-year indexes by includingit in an end-o-year supplement with other content, with other magazines it isunclear whether publishers charged a ee or reduced the listing o their contents

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to ft into whatever amount o paper they had allotted, or both. Ward could haveremedied this defciency in his bibliography by including in an appendix listsindicating which issues he reviewed frst-hand, which contents were listed onlyrom end-o-year indexes and which issues he never saw. As it stands, a user can-not know, or example, whether Ward indexed a particular issue or year. Wardappears to have seen (in some orm) the contents o the Aberdeen Magazineor 1796, but he has no entries or that title or either 1788 or 1789; yet boththose earlier years contain literary reviews. Nor can a reader know which mag-azines Ward reviewed careully but ound no reviews, as or example RWWRound with the run oGenius o Kent. Such lists would have allowed subsequent

researchers to fll in or supplement his work, as necessary. Tese are signifcantdefciencies, particularly because most users, dipping into Ward to fnd lists oreviews or a particular author, have no idea how much they might be missing.

Tis leads to the most signifcant o Wards defciencies: scope. Ward defnedliterary to mean poetry, drama or fction. He excluded all other genres: memoir,travel journal, literary biography, non-fction prose, childrens literature, religioustreatises and so orth though by the last volume he did make exception or theprose o Mary Wollstonecra and the non-belletristic prose o Samuel aylorColeridge and William Godwin as well as or the ra o responses to TomasPaine.8 As a result, Hester Lynch Trale Piozzi receives not a single entry in any

volume o Wards bibliography, though as this frst volume oRWWR reveals,her Observations on a our through France garnered six reviews in 1789 alone.

Ward urther excluded all oreign literatures (except American) as well as ear-lier English literature, a position he altered in his ourth volume by includingin an appendix reviews o certain benchmark English authors, Milton, Shake-speare, Pope and Johnson.9 (Tis decision mirrorsRWWRs determination thatRomantic reviews o works rom earlier periods oer important inormationabout the literary, historical and cultural backgrounds against which Romantic

writers wrote.) By including such materials, Ward gave the illusion o complete-ness to a project that lacked an overriding editorial policy.

Ultimately the problem with Wards index is its very haphazardness. Wardgathered reerences to reviews based on his own research interests and on his

perception o what he might later wish to know. His decisions when collectingthe entries were not based on coherent, or even articulated, editorial principles,

and at the point o publishing his research notes he chose not to address thesequestions in his preatory materials. What he does well (poetry), he does very

well. But there is no way to tell what he has not done or what he has only mostlydone. O course his tactic worked: or thirty-eight years, no one asked; andsince its publication, users have treated Wards index as a comprehensive lens toreviews in 134 magazines, orming a picture o the Romantic critical heritage. Inthe end, however, Wards bibliography is by no means comprehensive.

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Te present edition addresses this shortall, building on the entries Ward pro-vided, but supplementing that inormation by a new examination o magazines,whenever possible. In terms o prose reviews alone,RWWRs examination o themagazines has yielded 2080 per cent more material (depending on which mag-azines we are consulting) than is listed in Ward. For example, in Volume 1 alone,

RWWR provides 67 previously unnoted reviews. As such, RWWR provides acomprehensive collection o contemporary reviews o the works o Romantic

women writers appearing in British periodicals between 1789 and 1819, datescorresponding to the beginning o the French Revolution through the aer-math o the Napoleonic wars.RWWR gathers works that Ward ignored because

they were not clearly literary, such as Maria Edgeworths Practical Educationor Helen Maria Williamss Letters fom France or Susanna MacIvers Cookery

and Pastery or the various justifcations published by the Countess Valois de laMotte or by Margaret Stewart. As a comprehensive collection,RWWR providesreviews both o women now receiving critical attention (whether or not those

women were well reviewed in contemporary periodicals) and o women nowunknown or nearly so, but who received considerable attention rom contempo-rary reviewers. In doing so,RWWR provides reviews o books that appear to beno longer extant, allowing critics to examine what books have disappeared rom

view and perhaps why. By providing the critical reception o works by women,RWWR also helps critics identiy books that need recuperation.

As an edition,RWWR enables scholars to interrogate the history o women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It provides theongoing archival recuperation that Kim Wheatley has identifed as neces-sary or the rediscovery o Romantic women writers, the main growth area in

Romantic studies.10 It aids scholars in combating the widespread social andscholarly amnesia, as racy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin described it in 1999, thatstill besets most o the women writers o the Romantic age regardless o their

contemporary success.11 More specifcally,RWWR promotes greater examina-tion o the responses o contemporary critics to individual women writers andtheir works, to women writers in the Romantic book trade and to categorieso women writers (poets, dramatists, novelists, etc). RWWR allows critics and

scholars to reconsider the ollowing areas: the nature o womens writing (genres,range, amount, and so on); the reception o women writers across magazines; therelationship between women authors and periodical reviewers; and the natureo periodical reviewing in the early nineteenth century. RWWR broadens ourunderstanding o the nature o literary authorship, o the history o the literarymarketplace, and the role o gender in reception.

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Te World as We Know It: Women Writers and ContemporaryReviews

Most studies o Romantic periodicals ocus on particular magazines themselves,oen in terms o a historical examination o their practices and editorial sta as

with John Clives 1957 Scotch Reviewers: Te Edinburgh Review, 18021815;Peter F. Morgans 1983Literary Critics and Reviewers in Early Nineteenth-Cen-tury Britain; Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wus 2002 collection British

Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review; or Jonathan Cutmores two works onthe Quarterly Review, his 2007 essay collection Conservatism in the Quarterly

Review or his 2008 study Contributors to the Quarterly Review.Other scholarsplace the magazines in broader cultural or political contexts such as Kim Wheat-leys 2003 collectionRomantic Periodicals and Print Culture; Kevin Gilmartins2007 Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 17901832or Mark Parkers 2000 Literary Magazines and British Romanticism whichocuses on magazines as literary orms.

Te relationship between gender and Romantic periodicals has also receivedsome consideration, but typically this concern rests with women as writers and ascritics. Alison Adburghams 1972 Women in Printdiscusses popular magazinesand the women who wrote or them or who appeared serialized in their pages.12Mary Waterss British Women Writers and the Proession o Literary Criticism,17891832 analyses women writers as critics, as does Gay Gibson Cimas 1999

o be Public as a Genius and Private as a Woman: Te Critical Framing oNineteenth-Century British Women Playwrights; several articles on Mary Wol-lstonecras work including Mitzi Myerss 2002 Mary Wollstonecras LiteraryReviews; and Michael Gamers discussion o Elizabeth Moodys critical reviewo James Tomson inRomanticism and the Gothic.13

But studies o the reception o Romantic women writers are strikingly absent,except o course or that o Jane Austen. Certainly Derek Ropers 1978Review-ing beore the Edinburgh oers a history o periodical reviewing and, in doing so,briey examines reviews o several well-known women writers: Charlotte Smith,Ann Radclie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Clara Reeve, Fanny Burney,Maria Edgeworth and Mary Wollstonecra. But his work is the only ull-lengthstudy to do so. Dishearteningly, o the 44 women writers who had more than

fve books reviewed between 1788 and 1826, only three have been subjects oreception studies, even though Wards bibliography has listed reviews or each othese 44 or almost orty years. A search o the Modern Language AssociationInternational Bibliography produces only our articles: two on Amelia Opie, oneon Madame de Genlis and one on Maria Edgeworth.14 And only Greg Kucichs2000 Reviewing Women in British Romantic Teatre examines the receptiono a class o writers: women dramatists. By bringing attention to reviews perhaps

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General Introduction xv

otherwise inaccessible to critics,RWWR hopes to encourage urther studies owomen writers and their reception in the magazines.

O course, the high regard or Austen is a positive development in the recon-sideration o emale authors in the period. But this attention to Austen may inact have obscured many o the other women authors o her time and distortedour perceptions o the contemporary literary scene. Tough scholars acknowl-edge Austen is not typical o the market, her experience has inadvertently shapedour narratives o how the early nineteenth-century book trade unctioned ando how women writers ared within it. Austen published only six novels, andthose novels collectively garnered only 17 reviews in her lietime. Writing under

the pseudonym A Lady, Austen earned little or her copyrights only 110 orPride and Prejudice. Based on the limited sample o Austens experience as a nov-elist, critical discussion o women writers in the early nineteenth-century booktrade oen rests on our implicit assumptions:

1. Women did not publish as much as men did.2. Women who did publish were not requently reviewed in the periodical

press.15

3. Women typically published under assumed names or pseudonyms.16

4. Women received poor compensation rom publishers or their copyrights.

Tese assumptions do not take into account the realities o the marketplace, or

that other women ared better in it than Austen did. Compare or example Aus-tens 17 lietime reviews to Mary Robinsons 78, Maria Edgeworths 77, AmeliaOpies 69, Elizabeth Inchbalds 64, Sydney Owensons 62 and Jane Wests 61, etc.Constructed without a ull picture o the market, these implicit assumptions givea limited and distorted picture o womens production and reception. Yet thesearbitrary narratives hold the status o such truth that ew scholars have engagedin the primary research necessary to test their accuracy. As a result, assumptionssuch as these have set artifcial limits on the studies done on Romantic women

writers in particular and on the early nineteenth-century book trade in general.Strikingly, however, a broader look at the market reveals women writers in

numbers we have never beore imagined. I we treat the entries in Wards bib-liography as data to be mined or inormation about the market, we fnd that

between 1789 and 1824, 448 women wrote 997 texts reviewed or noticed in theBritish periodical press. O these, 168 earned reviews or more than one book,and the number o reviews in total or womens works reaches over 3,700. Ocourse, these fgures do not measure total production by women, since only a

portion o published works garnered reviews. I, or example using Peter Gar-side, James Raven and Ranier Schwerlings two-volume bibliographical surveyo prose fction, Te English Novel, 17701829 we compare the numbers o

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novels reviewed against those not reviewed, we fnd that o the 772 novels pub-lished in the eleven years between 1789 and 1799, 689 were reviewed, or 89 percent. Te ratios or other genres are nearly impossible to estimate because nocomprehensive bibliography or poetry, drama or non-fction prose exists cor-responding to Garside, Raven and Schowerlings work or prose fction. Further,though novels between 1789 and 1799 were reviewed 89 per cent o the time,

we cannot assume that fgure would hold true or any other genre. Unortunatelyaer 1799, we cannot even easily assess the ratios o novels reviewed, since Gar-side, Raven and Schowerling eliminate notices o reviews in their second volume.

We can, however, assume the gap between reviewed and not-reviewed wid-

ens over time in part because o the increasing numbers o published works. Forexample, the number o novels published rises almost constantly in each ten-yearperiod rom 1770 to 1829: 297 in 17709; 334 in 17809; 405 in 17909; 705in 18009; 682 in 181019; 824 in 18209. Te growing numbers o publica-tions to review would have made it harder or review journals like theAnalytical

Review, Critical Review andMonthly Review (which attempted to notice all pub-lished works) to keep up. Further, in 1802 with the appearance o theEdinburgh

Review, selective reviewing became more and more the norm. Tereore, sinceonly a portion o the published books gained critical attention, being reviewedindicates contemporary value or at least contemporary noteworthiness. By note-

worthy, I mean literally worthy o notice or good or or ill. One can write a verygood book that is ignored by the critics, and a very bad one that the critics love to

bash. Tis noteworthiness helps us measure not so much the quality o womensproduction, perhaps, as the nature o literary taste in the period. And that tastediers remarkably rom our own. Te number o times a text was reviewed canalso oer a guide to what the culture thought most worthy o comment.

We would recognize today perhaps only hal o the names o women withmore than ten titles reviewed: Charlotte Smith (22 texts), Eliza Parsons (19),Mary Pilkington (15), Jane West and Maria Edgeworth (14 texts each), Ame-lia Opie and Mary Robinson (13 each), Elizabeth Inchbald (12); Madame deGenlis, Lady Morgan and Mary Meeke (11 each). And we would certainly behard-pressed to name more than one or two works by each woman thoughit is highly likely that many could easily name allo Austens works. Further,i we were to create a top twenty list o most noteworthy women writers in

the early nineteenth century, we would see even more unamiliar names thatew o us would recognize today: Eliza S. Frances, Mrs E. G. Bayfeld, MargaretHolord, Anna Maria MacKenzie and Mrs John Hunter. All these women wererequently reviewed in the British periodical press, each receiving between 35and 50 reviews between 1789 and 1819. But on that same list, women we fndnoteworthy received less attention: Fanny Burney ranks 38th, Jane Austen 50thand Mary Shelley 151st.

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Clearly there is a gap between our modern valuing o these authors and thevaluing o their contemporaries. Tis gap raises important questions about theinterests and tastes o Romantic readers and about the dynamics o the Roman-tic literary marketplace. But we cannot answer these questions without a clearersense o who was in that marketplace, what status they gained there and howtheir works were perceived by readers and reviewers o the day. o date, scholarshave a remarkably di cult time addressing these issues, largely because the mate-rials that would enable such studies have been inaccessible or unavailable. Andor this reason,RWWR oers not an updated bibliography flling in what Wardoverlooked but an edited collection o that expanded terrain.

Scope and Purpose

Te title o this project Romantic Women Writers Reviewed suggests anorderly sort o Venn diagram with three circles: Romantic writers in one, women

writers in another and reviews in the third. Te overlapping bit between the threecircles then would be the scope o this project. And, as ar as it goes, that diagramis correct. Te problems are ones o defnition and category. What constitutes a

woman writer? What constitutes a review? What constitutes Romantic? I willdiscuss each in turn.

What Constitutes a Woman Writer?

One might think that the category woman writer is straightorward, includingthose works known to be by women authors. But known when? Is it su cientthat we now know the work to be by a woman as or example with the 1812novel Says She to Her Neighbour, What?, attributed on the title page to an

old-ashioned Englishman but later attributed to Barbara Hoand,17 or theanonymous 1790Delia only attributed to Miss Pilkington by the 1814 publica-tion o theMinerva Catalogue?Or must the writers identity have been knownat the time o publication or reviews? And what does known mean? Must the

work be signed by the author on the title page o the frst edition? (I mean signedhere in the sense o a printed authorial attribution, rather than a handwrittensignature.) Or can an author sign the title page o second and subsequent edi-tions? ake or example the maddening string o attributions associated with

M. Harley, later Mrs Hugill, who signs her frst book as by a young lady, thensigns the second book as by the author o the frst, and so on, until the ourthnovel, which she signs with her name ollowed by the author o the frst novel.And is it the title page that must be signed or will other locations in the bookdo, such as a dedication or preace? What i the book itsel is not signed, but a

paratext in a signed work (such as a list o advertisements or other works bythe same author) claims it? Tese last three, or example, are all avourite ploys

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o Hannah More. Further, is an authors acknowledgement o an earlier anony-mous work on the signed title page o a later one su cient? Determining whena contemporary reader knew who authored what is complicated.

But o course the problem o time is not the only one: there is also the prob-lem o attribution itsel. Certainly, or RWWRs purposes, it does not matterthat Jan Fergus reattributed novels long thought to be by Eliza Kirkham StrongMathews to Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins both are named women writers, andas such would have been included in RWWR. But what about works that havenever been attributed to a particular woman writer, but which were signed by aLady? Or works where the title page (or dedication, preace or even the adver-

tisements) attributes the work to a woman but the actual author was a man, orvice versa? We believe that William Henry Hall wrote Death o Cain, but theoriginal work signed its title page as by a Lady. For contemporary readers, thattext was considered as woman-authored.

Additionally, what about works published by the original author in a oreignlanguage but translated into English by women? Certainly i the original text

was woman-authored, we would include discussions o the text regardless o thetranslator. But what about texts authored by men, but translated by women: doreviews o Henrietta Colebrookes translation o Rousseau matter?

In response to these questions about attribution,RWWR ollows these twoeditorial principles.

RWWR collects reviews o works by known women authors regardless owhen the attribution to that woman occurred.

RWWR collects reviews o works presented to their original audiences aswoman-authored.

Te frst principle covers women masquerading as men: i we now know awoman wrote the text, then reviews o those works are included in RWWR. Inthe case o men cross-dressing as women, we go back to the gender provided tothe original audience. I the work is presented as by woman, RWWR includesreviews o that work. In the case o translations, the reviewers make clear thattranslation is an intellectual activity that goes beyond copying and that thereare good translations and bad; as a result, we include reviews o translations by

women writers. (Given these complications to the category o woman writer, whenever I reer to women writers or works by women writers, I do so as ashorthand or this complicated gender dynamic.)

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What Constitutes a Review?

Tis answer shis depending on the type o periodical. Antonia Forster in the preace to her Index to Book Reviews in England, 17751800, distinguishesbetween review journals and magazines. Tough I adopt her frst term, or thelatter I use the term miscellanies, preserving the term magazine or the generalclass o periodical in which both review journals and miscellanies all.

Review journals are nicely consistent, even orderly. Tey tend to devote themajority o their pages to two sections: an initial section o long reviews, eachcontaining substantive extracts rom the work under review; and a Catalogueo brie (sometimes very brie ) notices o many works that typically contain no

extracts, only summary and critique. In some magazines this catalogue is subdi-vided into general topics poetry, novels, medical, divinity or religion butthose areas are uid and idiosyncratic: Te Critical Reviews 1789 catalogue alsoincludes additional divisions or miscellaneous, slave-trade and controversial,

while the 1789Monthly Review catalogue oers sections or negroe-slavery,political and education, school-books, etc.. Some review journals may alsoinclude a brie concluding section or domestic or oreign aairs, or or birth anddeath data or the month. But the primary ocus o a review journal is reviews.Further, these reviews look like what we would recognize today as reviews, orclose to it. In most cases, reviewers give some sense o the content o the bookunder consideration (sometimes including a plot summary) and the quality o

that work. Some reviews clearly see their purpose as to improve their audiencestaste, so they oen will extract especially beautiul passages or notice. In addi-tion, in some cases, the reviewer oers advice to the author (correct your textmore careully, avoid this or that subject matter, or, as to Hannah Wallis on her

publication o religious meditations, pray more, write less).18

Miscellanies, in contrast, oer a range o materials to appeal to a broadaudience, and the extent o that range depends on the target audience. All mis-cellanies include articles on a range o topics, domestic and oreign news; births,deaths and marriages o eminent persons; sections or poetry, whether original orextracted rom published works; and extracts rom prose works. But some, likethe New London Magazine and the Gentlemans Magazine, included as well pre-erments, bankruptcies, prices o stocks, prices o corn, mortality bills and so on.

As an example o the contents o a typical miscellany, in addition to the standardcontents listed above, the January 1789 issue o the Edinburgh Magazine and

Literary Miscellany included articles on the weather, antiquities, political newsand legal decisions, religious aairs, reections on world events (such as, in the

January 1789 issue, an account o the earthquake at Lisbon) and parliamentarydebates. A miscellany devoted to women, like theNew Ladys Magazine, oeredarticles on the royal amily, deportment, ashionable dress, fction and poetry (in

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a much greater proportion than other miscellanies) as well as puzzles, enigmasand rebuses or the reader to solve (or to propose) alongside answers to previ-ous enigmas provided by readers, typically in original poetry. Miscellanies onlyrarely provided prose reviews o the type one fnds in review journals. But ithe volume under review was a work o poetry, miscellanies oen provided areview in verse. In addition, one requently fnds sonnets to this or that poet andto a specifc volume o recently published poetry (such as the sonnets to AnnaSeward, to Ann Yearsley and to the air mourner Charlotte Smith, a reerenceto herElegiac Sonnets).19

At the same time that miscellanies tend to avoid the standard prose review,

they requently oer materials that give a sense o the authors reception in thebroader marketplace. Signifcant books, even i that signifcance is popularity,are requently extracted. With prose works, such as Elizabeth, Lady Cravens

Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople or Hester Piozzis Observations andReections on a our, those extracts appear in long sections across several monthlyinstalments. Oen, the frst instalment will oer a bit o critical commentary(such as or the next several months, we will extract Mrs. Joness ascinatingand useul book on ), but subsequent instalments provide the extract with-out any such introduction. With poetry volumes, miscellanies will oen extractone or two poems, typically with no commentary at all, and oen without anyindication what book provides the extract. Yet to exclude this material whicha researcher is unlikely to fnd except by paging through each volume o each

magazine asRWWR has done would be to allow such valuable indicators o womens signifcance in the marketplace once more to disappear rom view. Itwould elide the multiple ways in which readers o magazines received womensworks and the multiple ways in which womens ame was constructed.

In addition to extracted works, miscellanies also included original pieces bywomen, in prose, poetry and translation which would not in themselves benoticed inRWWR. In many cases, these works as in the case o novelist AnneBlowers contributions to the General Magazine are original works by a noted

women writer, and they unction as an indicator o her market value and status.But in other cases, the magazine becomes a microcosm o the processes at workin the marketplace at large: women write to the editors oering their works or

publication (their acceptances and rejections are recorded in the correspondence

columns). Once published, their contributions spur responses and commentaryrom other readers, including poetic reviews. We then have women writers being

published and reviewed, though in a reduced context. Drawing a boundarybetween reviews o external works and o internal ones becomes di cult, par-ticularly when women like Blower wrote on both sides o that boundary.20

Given the diversity o kinds o reception to womens texts, then, RWWRtakes the ollowing additional principle:

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RWWR includes not only traditional reviews, but also other texts that tes-tiy to the work o women writers in the period.

What Constitutes Romantic?

In asking whatRomanticdesignates, I do not here enter the long debate over themeaning o the term Romanticism or Romantic. I share in the critical consen-sus that Romanticism is a useul term simply to designate a particular literary

period, without also claiming that the term suggests a consistent perspective orcontent across its writers. I rather address what is the relationship between theterm Romantic and the term woman writer?Is she an author writing in the period

we designate or utilitys sake as Romanticism? Romantic by birth, death or pub-lication date? In that case, should RWWR exclude rom inclusion the articlesand reviews o women writers who clearly interested reviewers and their readersbut who were not living (or even recently dead) at the time? Is it insignifcantthat Mary Queen o Scots, Margaret Roper or Margaret Cavendish, the Duch-ess o Newcastle all receive commentary in the period and in the case o MaryQueen o Scots explicit reviews? Should we ignore the poetic reviews o Sap-

pho? Given that Romanticists have long acknowledged the periods ascinationwith the past, it seemed somehow inappropriate in period terms to excluderom view these additional possibilities or study.

As a fnal principle, then:

RWWR includes works o reception that indicate the importance o womenwriters or the Romantic period in general, regardless o the historical periodin which the woman lived.

What RRWR Includes

In light o these principles, I oer the ollowing descriptions o what RWWRprovides:

1. RWWR provides in ull all reviews o the work o women writers, whetherthose reviews appear as poetry or prose. Any extracted portions o the origi-nal text included in prose reviews are provided in ull as well. Te extracts

a reviewer chose to include shaped how readers received the text; what theeditor included and elided or edited are important parts o the receptionhistory o the original text under review. While some reviews are so brieas to be more accurately described as notices (such as the reviewers dictumto Hannah Wallis mentioned above), we make no attempt to distinguishbetween reviews and notices, fnding like Ward such an attempt not onlymisleading but impossible.21

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xxii Romantic Women Writers Reviewed: Volume 1

2. RWWR provides in ull any extract rom the work o a woman writer thatincludes some critical commentary by an editor or reviewer. Long extractsare typically a eature o miscellanies, but one could easily argue that review

journals requently oer little beyond a series o extracts with a bit o criticalcommentary. Since we collect those extracts in ull as reviews, we collect theextracts in the miscellanies in ull as well, as long as that extract is accompa-nied by some piece o critical commentary. Under this rule we collect twoadditional categories o material: biographical notices o women writersand (some) theatrical reviews. Tough critical commentary is more obvious

with the biographical notices, the theatrical reviews invariably include some

remark on the relationship between the writers text and that perormed onthe stage, or on the nature o the writers skill, such as the reviewers com-ment that Mrs Inchbald has drawn rom her own ertile imagination.22 Wealso include critical articles discussing women writers in general, even whenthose articles do not mention a specifc women writers name; these are typi-cally provided at the start o each magazines section.

3. In the case o extracts (whether in prose or poetry) withoutcritical commen-tary,RWWR provides enough inormation to allow researchers to identiy

whether they need to consult the original magazines in which the extractsoccur. In the case o prose extracts, we provide a bibliographic citation andup to the frst 50 words o the opening paragraph. In the case o poeticextracts, we provide a bibliographic citation, ollowed by the frst and last

lines o the poem. In doing this we make no distinction between extractso externally published work and original work published in the magazineitsel.

4. RWWR also provides some contextual inormation that enriches our under-standing o the women being reviewed in these volumes and o the placeo womens works in the Romantic marketplace. Tis category is an ollapodrida, including inormation rom columns like Notes to Correspond-ents, Catalogue o New Books and Teatrical Register. Each o thesecolumns shaped the ways that readers saw the place o women writers in themagazine beore them, and by extension in the marketplace at large. Notesto correspondents provided the editors correspondence with contributors,and one could easily argue that the insertions were in part advance advertis-

ing, calling attention to orthcoming contents in the magazine as well asshaping the sorts o contributions the editor wished to receive. For exam-

ple, when the editor o the New Ladys Magazine or March 1789 rejectedcontributions claiming that the ollowing pieces cannot with propriety beadmitted into our Miscellany, by Reason o their various Deects or assertedthat a particular piece does not appear su ciently interesting to our Read-ers, to warrant its [sic] Insertion, that editor is articulating (however

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General Introduction xxiii

vaguely) a set o criteria that other contributors would do well to ollow. Forscholars o the book trade, these columns indicate something o the ways in

which the business o literary periodical publishing was conducted. Whenthose notices extend to works submitted by women, we include them. Cata-logues o new books oered a selective list o the months most noteworthy

publications and because those lists were selective, we notice them only orthe women listed; we do not reproduce these lists in ull. Teatrical registersare treated similarly to the catalogues o new books; because they indicatethe place o womens works in the broader theatrical market and oen sug-gest the motivations o specifc book reviews being published at the time, we

digest the relevant portions.

What RWWR Excludes

Tough it seems we have cast our net widely,RWWR does not include a greatdeal o inormation relative to women generally. For example, we do not inany way collect reerences to women who are not writers, such as biographieso amous women like the Duchess o Kingston. We do not collect enigmati-cal questions posed by women or answers to those questions by women, even

when those questions or answers take the orm o original poetry by women(though in this latter case, we do try to oer ootnotes indicating the pres-ence o those original works by women). Tough we have included a noticeo a book attributed to Dorothy Jordan, we do not include notices o womenactors unless they appear in a review o a play written by a woman. In the cases

where, to the best o our knowledge, books remain unsigned and unattrib-uted the truly anonymous works RWWR does not include reviews o orreerences to those texts. In gleaning inormation rom columns such as cor-respondence, we do not include notices to women who asked or inormationnot related explicitly to the book trade, such as the woman who wrote to theeditor o theLadys Magazine asking or medical advice (she wanted to knowhow to get rid o a beard and was reerred to a doctor). I should also notehere that RWWR only includes reviews rom magazines; it does not collectreviews rom newspapers, though newspapers consistently provided reviewsin their pages. Te reasoning is simple: including reviews rom newspapers,

or which there is not even an unreliable index, expands the scope oRWWRimpossibly. We leave that edition to someone else. As does Ward, reviews romnewspapers are only included i they appear in extract in a reviewing journalor miscellany.

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xxiv Romantic Women Writers Reviewed: Volume 1

Organization o Each Volume

RWWR is organized by year, then by magazine, and within magazine, by womanalphabetically. Inside each woman writers section, commentary on her works isorganized chronologically, allowing researchers to trace the development o atexts reception across the year and to see the interrelationships o reviews andother types o reception. A chronological organization encourages critics tounderstand the reception o an individual author as part o a larger market oreach year, and the organization by magazine encourages users to consider howthe agendas o those periodicals inuenced the reviews within them. At the endo each set o volumes, we include headnotes or authors and or magazines, giv-

ing an overview o political, religious or social agendas.

Organization o Individual Entries

Each entry is headed by a bibliographic citation including three segments oinormation:

1. Te volume and issue number, separated by a colon, ollowed by the partnumber (which is introduced by the abbreviation no.).

2. Inside parentheses, the day (i provided) and month.3. Te inclusive page numbers or the span o the article in the magazine.

Tus, a ull bibliographic entry would look like this:

17:1, no. 3 (27 March), pp. 212.

Te review described by this citation appeared in volume 17, issue 1 o a maga-zine published on 27 March, and that article spanned pages 21 and 22. Because

RWWR is organized frst by year, then by magazine, bibliographic citations donot repeat the magazine title or the year.

When a magazine does not provide particular pieces o inormation, suchas issue or part numbers,RWWR simply omits that data rom the bibliographiccitation. For example, or annuals, an RWWR bibliographic citation includesonly the volume (i designated) and page numbers.

I the bibliographic citation is preceded by an alphabetical code, then thetext that ollows is not a reviewper se. Te ollowing codes indicate what type o

material ollows:

B. biographical notice, or memoir. C. correspondence, notes to correspondents, etc. E-D. dramatic extract without commentary. E-Po. poetic extract without commentary. E-Pr. prose extract without commentary. Re. reerence to an author in an article not examining her workper se. . Teatrical review.

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General Introduction xxv

Reviews in prose or poetry do not receive any special code, only a biblio-graphic entry.

Following the bibliographic citation is the title which appeared in the reviewjournal or miscellany. We provide titles o works as they are represented by thereview, not as the title appears on the title page o the work in question: orexample, i the title o the work on its title page appears as Te Priory o St. Ber-nard, but the review lists it as St. Bernards Priory, we ollow the inormation inthe review itsel. In terms o typography, we ormat titles or consistency across

RWWR which does not reect the ormatting or typography o the text beingreviewed. Retaining such a variety o ormatting in house styles or example

12mo, 12mo, 12 mo, and 12 mo oers little material value or the user. Bookand print historians would be more likely to consult the volumes themselvesor such inormation. As a result, we regularize all titles to eliminate idiosyn-cratic ormatting (save capitalization o words); and we retain (or add) italics toindicate the title o the text under review and any other texts mentioned in theheading, such as lists o texts also written by a particular author. RWWR doesnot place these titles in single quotation marks or several reasons, not the leasto which being a desire to keep the transcribed text clean o unacknowledgededitorial interventions. Te magazines themselves add inormation to the titlesuch as bibliographic ormat, price, number o pages and publisher, which ewresearchers would consider part o the books title. We include that data as well.

Further, some columns are less columns than a distinct set o paragraphs

with a common ocus, such as notes to contributors or theatrical notices. Maga-zines tend to use generalized titles or such omnibus columns, but those titlesare not always provided as specifc headers to the reviews, but sometimes appearonly in the running head. ake or example a theatrical review o Ann Yearsleys

Earl Goodwinwhich appears on page 381. Te title header or the column Te-atrical Journal appears on page 380; another title header Bath appears atthe top o page 381, and the review o Yearsleys play (several paragraphs down)begins simply with the words, November 2 ush le on the same line as the sen-tence o the review: Earl Goodwin, a ragedy by Mrs Yearsley, was acted here thefrst time.23 Which o these units is the title? Or are all o them? Since November2 would not by itsel indicate that these are theatre reviews, nor would the single

word Bath,RWWR provides all these units, separated by ull stops. With somecolumns, as with correspondence, paragraphs are dropped into the text wher-ever the publisher fnds room, sometimes with only a rule above and below to setit apart rom the surrounding text, sometimes not even with that. When no titleis provided in the magazine,RWWR provides none as well.

Following the title is the text o the review. Within the text o the review,RWWR reproduces typographical ormatting, including italics, ull and smallcapitals, with the exception o drop caps on frst letters or all caps on frst words.

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xxvi Romantic Women Writers Reviewed: Volume 1

When entries span no more than a single page, the page number appears only inthe bibliographic citation at the top o the entry. For items spanning more thanone page, page numbers are provided in square brackets at the endo each pageo the original text.

Cross-Reerencing within Magazines

Within each magazine,RWWR cross-reerences allusions to or explicit men-tions o women writers. When a reerence to a woman writer appears in a reviewo a male or anonymous writers works, we provide the relevant portions o thatreview under the name o the woman mentioned. For example, a reerence to

Hester Piozzi in the Critical Reviews 1789 notice o Della CruscasDiversity: APoem would be indicated as ollows:

Re. 67 (January), pp. 12930.Diversity: A Poem. By Della Crusca. 4to. 2s. 6d. Bell.[Extracted portion o Della Crusca review.]

Te frst line o the entry would provide the bibliographic citation preceded bythe word Re. Te second line would provide the magazines title or the reviewo Della Cruscas text, ollowed by the extract itsel which provides that portiono the review that mentions or discusses Piozzi. Since the article itsel is con-cerned with another topic, we will when necessary use ellipses to make clear thatthe quoted section is only a portion o a review, and not simply a short notice.

When a reerence to a woman writer appears in a review o the work oanother woman writer, we provide a reerence to the review and its location in

RWWR. For example, a reerence to Anna Laetitia Barbauld in the AnalyticalReviews 1789 notice o Miss Lewiss Poems, Moral and Entertainingwould beplaced under Barbaulds name as ollows:

Re. See LewissPoems, 3 (January), pp. 746.

Users then would consult Lewiss section or the mention o Barbauld.

Cross-Reerencing across Magazines

For reerences across magazines, users depending on their research needs

should consult each magazine individually, the index o women reviewedappearing in each volume or the cumulative index at the end o each set o

volumes.

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Additional echnical Notes

reatment o Prose Extracts

E-Pr. provides a quotation o the frst 3050 words o the article in extract. Ithe portion RWWR quotes appears on the frst page o the article, we do not

provide the page number, it being understood that the quoted portion comesrom the frst page o the article in extract. I the portion we quote crosses a pagebreak, then we provide page numbers in square brackets. We include ellipsesonly i the extract does not end on a ull stop.

reatment o Poetic ExtractsPoetic extracts provide the frst and last lines o the poem extracted in the maga-zine. We exclude introductory epigraphs rom other authors, but include asbeing the authors own composition the frst sentence o any preatory proseargument. Since we provide the page numbers in the bibliographic citation, andfrst lines will appear on the frst page listed, and last lines on the last page, we donot repeat the page numbers in the quoted portion o the poem.

Anonymous, Pseudonymous and Attributed itles

Anonymous and pseudonymous texts attributed to particular authors arelisted under that authors name, regardless o when the attribution occurred.

Unattributed anonymous and pseudonymous texts presented to audiences as woman-authored (such as by a lady, by a young lady, by a mother, by theauthoress, young emale oreigner, etc.) are grouped each year under the genericterm Lady. Tis grouping allows users an ease o searching, placing all genderedtitles in a single location within a magazines entries, rather than distributingthem across the magazine according to their various authorial designations.

Making Attributions

RWWR uses a number o sources to make attributions or anonymous andpseudonymous texts. Our original database drew entries or womens texts rom Williams WardsLiterary Reviews in British Periodicals, 17891826; thereore,we began with his attributions. Whenever possible, we have verifed attributions

o books by recourse to page images o title pages, preaces and dedications avail-able in electronic resources such as ECCO, the Internet Archive and GoogleBooks. For works or which we have been unable to access page images, we havedrawn on attribution inormation in a variety o reerence tools and catalogues:

Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundys Feminist Companion toLiterature in English ; Dorothy Blakeys Te Minerva Press, 17901820; COPACNational, Academic and Specialist Library Catalogue (http://copac.ac.uk/);

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xxviii Romantic Women Writers Reviewed: Volume 1

Gwenn Davis and Beverley A. Joyces Poetry by Women to 1900: A Bibliogra-phy o American and British Writers; Antonia ForstersIndex to Book Reviews inEngland, 17751800; Peter Garside, James Raven and Rainer Schwerlings TeEnglish Novel 17701829: A Bibliographical Survey o Prose Fiction Publishedin the British Isles; the English Short-itle Catalogue; Samuel Halkett and JohnLaingsDictionary o Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature; Charles HogansTe London Stage, 16001800: Part 5, 17761800; J. R. de J. JacksonsRoman-tic Poetry by Women; Robert D. Mayos Te English Novel in the Magazines,17401815; the New Cambridge Bibliography o English Literature; AllardyceNicollsA History o English Drama, 16601900, vol. 6: Alphabetical Catalogue

o Plays, 16601900; and Cambridge University Presss Orlando database; aswell as some specialized articles on individual authors. See Bibliography or ullsource inormation.

Whereas other reerence tools use question marks or square brackets to desig-nate questionable attributions, we indicate how we have determined authorshipor each work in an appendix to the fnal volume o each set. We have not triedto identiy authorship or the non-review items indicated by codes beore thebibliographic citations.

Signatures on Items

How extracts and original works are attributed to authors is important tounderstanding the role o women writers. As a result, we include all attributionsinternal to magazines, such as authorial signature at the beginning or end o theextract. Further, extracts will oen identiy their authors in more than one way.For example, the title o an extract might indicate its author is a lady, but also

provide at the end o the extract an actual name or pseudonym, or vice versa. Weprovide both identifers. Since not all poems provide dates o composition (orreputed dates o composition) or locations, we retain those as inormation thatresearchers might fnd useul or important.

Women with Multiple Names

Several women publish under multiple names, oen a result o marriage. Whilethe elegant solution would to be to pick one o those names and index to

that name consistently, doing so would obscure the name used in contempo-rary works and which a researcher might need to fnd additional inormationin contemporary materials. For example, though Anna Maria Mackenzie endsher career as a Mackenzie, she had previously published as Mrs Johnson, AnnaMaria Johnson, and A. M. Cox (in addition to her pseudonym Ellen o Exeter).o fnd reerences to her works in advertisements, letters and journals, or otherephemera, one would need to use the name by which she was known in a spe-

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General Introduction xxix

cifc year. We use as best as we can predict or confrm the name appropriateto the year being consulted. So, in 1789 she is alphabetized by Johnson, and in1798 by Mackenzie. All those names appear in the index with appropriate cross-reerences, and the authorial note on Mackenzie provides all names.

We have included some works or which authors have not been identifed,but which are gendered emale by reviewers. Tese are placed chronologicallyunder the general author, Lady. We choose chronological order because thoseinterested in a single title will use the indexes to fnd the page numbers on whichthat review appears, so it does not matter to those researchers what comes beoreand aer in the list. But researchers o women writers more generally or o the

book trade might fnd the chronological arrangement evocative or suggestive.Without organizing chronologically or example one could not make the pre-liminary observation we have that or most review journals more reviews oanonymous womens works appear in the second hal o the year, suggesting thatnamed authors were published earlier in the year, and anonymous women writ-ers ftted in as space permitted.

Memoirs and Putative Memoirs

A number o works present themselves as being written by real woman such asthose o Miss Julia Frank or Miss Catlane. Since those are presented as by womento their readers, we include reviews o them.

BracketsSome reviews provide interpolations using square brackets ([ ]), we have changedthose to angled brackets (< >), and retained square brackets or our editorial andbibliographic interpolations. Speculative interpolations use curly brackets ({ }).

Appendix on Editorial Process

RWWR based its primary list o reviews rom Wards index, then supplementedthat list with Forster and with our own page-by-page examination o the maga-zines. However, it is not always possible, despite our best eorts, to reproduceeverything Ward listed. In some cases, the holding libraries Ward indicated nolonger own the journals, and we can fnd no alternative holders. However, in an

appendix we include explicit statements about what we were unable to exam-ine ourselves, what Ward listed that we have been unable to acquire and whatmagazines we have additionally examined but ound no reviews. Given that wecannot always know what exactly Ward examined, we take those opportunitiesthat arise to examine additional titles. I those titles contain reviews, they areincluded in the body o the work; i they do not, we indicate that inormationin the appendix.

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xxx Romantic Women Writers Reviewed: Volume 1

Notes:

1. R. Haven, Review o William S. Ward,British Periodicals and Newspapers, 17891832,A Bibliography o Secondary Sources, 1973; Wil liam S. Ward,Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 17981820, A Bibliography,1972; Donald H. Reiman, ed. Te RomanticsReviewed, 1972, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 6:20 (June 1973), pp. 468, on p. 46.

2. Ibid., p. 48.3. Greg Kucich goes against this trend by treating Ward as a body o material to be analysed,

rather than a reerence tool. See G. Kucich, Reviewing Women in British Romantic Te-atre, in C. Burroughs (ed.), Women in British Romantic Literature: Drama, Perormance

and Society, 17901840(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 4876.4. M. Ives, Personal Correspondence, 2010.

5. ECCO is a subscription service as is Worldcat, but Worldcat allows some public search-ing at http://www.worldcat.org/. At the time o this writing Google Books remains aree service: http://books.google.com/; the Internet Archive is publicly unded: http://

www.archive.org/.6. W. S. Ward, Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 17981820: A Bibliography, 2 vols

(New York and London: Garland Publishing , 1972), vol. 1, p. xii.7. W. S. Ward, Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 18211826: A Bibliography (New

York and London: Garland Publishing , 1977), p. vii.8. W. S. Ward, Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 17891797: A Bibliography (New

York and London: Garland Publishing , 1979), p. viii.9. Ward,Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 18211826, p. x; Ward,Literary Reviews in

British Periodicals, 17891797, p. viii.10. K. Wheatley, Introduction, in K. Wheatley (ed.),Romantic Periodicals and Print Cul-

ture (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 118, on p. 3.

11. . C. Davis and E. Donkin, Introduction, in . C. Davis and E. Donkin (eds), Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999), pp. 112, on p. 2.

12. A work like Ann H. Joness 1986Ideas and Innovations: Bestsellers o Jane Austens Age,which oers substantive chapters to seven relatively unknown women novelists Eliza-beth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Mary Balour Brunton, Jane Porter, Anna Maria Porter,Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Charlotte Dacre is o interest here, but her ocusis ultimately biographical and historical, not concerned with reception except tangen-tially.

13. See M. Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), pp. 3742. Cimas article appears in Davis and Donkin (eds), Women and Play-writing, pp. 3553; and Myerss in C. L. Johnson (ed.), Cambridge Companion to MaryWollstonecra(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 8298.

14. See A. Bradley, Correcting Mrs. Opies Powers: TeEdinburgh Review o Amelia Opies

Poems (1802), in Wheatley (ed.), Romantic Periodicals, pp. 4161; S. King, Politics,Poetics and Propriety: Reviewing Amelia Opie,Romanticism on the Net, 2930 (Febru-aryMay 2003), at http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n29-30/index.html; G.Dow, On Reviewing Mme de Genlis, in J. Mallinson (ed.), Correspondence; Images o the

Eighteenth Century; Polemic; Style and Aesthetics (Oxord: Voltaire Foundation; 2004),pp. 13343; and A. Monnickendam, Te Odd Couple: Christian Isobel JohnstonesReviews o Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Scottish Literary Journal, 27:1 (Spring2000), pp. 2238.

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15. Kucich acknowledges that the amount o reviewing space devoted to women dramatistsin most periodicals, according to William Wards compilations, alls disproportionatelyshort o the attention bestowed on male dramatists, but he adds that nevertheless, the

vast majority o reviews o women dramatists assume an inviting tone and express [a]kind o eagerness to recognize emale talent (Reviewing Women in British RomanticTeatre, p. 50).

16. Paula Feldman opposes this assumption, arguing that during the period 17701835,women rarelypublished books o verse anonymously. With surprisingly ew exceptions,women who published poetry books proudly placed their real names on the title pageorm the very outset o their careers (P. R. Feldman, Women Poets and Anonymity inthe Romantic Era, in E. J. Clery, C. Franklin and P. Garside (eds), Authorship, Commerce,

and the Public Scenes o Writing, 17501850(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002),

pp. 4453, on p. 44). Stephanie Eckroths work on women and anonymity, orthcomingin the Ashgate collection Women Writers and the Artiacts o Celebrity, indicates a similarpattern among women novelists.

17. Tanks to Stephanie Eckroth or this example o a male to emale reattribution.18. General Magazine, 3 (1790).19. See Gentlemans Magazine (January 1789), below, p. 248; European Magazine, 16

(November 1789), below, pp. 194 15;Gentlemans Magazine (September 1789), below,p. 249.

20. I list only those contributionspresentedto contemporary readers as by women or wom-ens pseudonyms. I have made no attempt to list anonymous contributions identifed asby women in Robert D. Mayos Te English Novel in the Magazines, 17401815 (Evan-ston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1962).

21. Ward,Literary Reviews in British Periodicals, 17891797, p. xv.22. Monthly Review, 80 (January 1789), below, p. 320.

23. European Magazine, 16 (November 1789), below, p. 193.

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Documents

General Introduction From Romantic Women Writers Reviewed