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The Author and the Agent: Women's Writing And THE AUTHOR AND THE AGENT: WOMEN’S WRITING AND COMMERCIAL PUBLISHING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND A Dissertation by KATE ELIZABETH OZMENT Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Margaret J.M. Ezell Committee Members, Maura Ives Mary Ann O’Farrell James Rosenheim Head of Department, Maura Ives May 2018 Major Subject: English Copyright 2018 Kate Ozment ABSTRACT Writing from the end of the seventeenth century through the mid-eighteenth century in England, the fair triumvirate of wit—consisting of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood—are pivotal figures in the history of feminist literary recovery. What has been key to their contemporary popularity is that each used print to reach their audiences. Yet for women who consistently printed their work, little is known about their publishing practices: how they chose their booksellers, how much they were paid, or what input they may have had over design. My dissertation recovers this history and argues that a historically accurate account of women’s publishing reshapes literary studies, economic history, bibliography, and book history. Three chapters explore the relationship between authors and booksellers and the influence that tradesmen have on the development of women’s writing. As financiers, booksellers had economic motivations for encouraging the feminine personas that Behn, Manley, and Haywood created to sell their work. These personas are often described as individual constructions, but booksellers provided the paratextual space and augmented authors’ textual choices through graphic design and advertising. This conclusion emphasizes that female professional authors were as equally influenced by their economic status as their gender, and I determine that a nuanced interpretation of the intersections of class and gender is necessary for authors who inhabit the literary marketplace. I conclude that feminist recovery work was essential for bringing Behn, Manley, ii and Haywood back into the academy, but it operates with what Kathryn R. King describes as “feminist models of marginalisation.” These models are useful in discursive and social settings, but they do not translate to a book market that valued and courted women’s efforts. Discursive models also participate in their own form of marginalization by neglecting to explore the non-textual material work of the book trade that these authors engaged in. This project demonstrates how a broader view of women’s authorship that accounts for the rhetoric of print, what Lisa Maruca calls “text work,” recasts them as actively engaged with the business of books. iii DEDICATION For my father, who gave me a love of reading, a tenacity for going after what I want, and love and support (and free food) through ten years of school. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my adviser, Margaret Ezell, for her unwavering support and multitude of letters of recommendation from the moment I began this program. You have been a model for daring and rigorous scholarship, and this work would not be possible without you. My thanks also to Maura Ives, Mary Ann O’Farrell, and James Rosenheim for their patience, guidance, and encouragement. For their help and feedback in a variety of ways, thanks to Todd Samuelson and the Book History Workshop crew, Lucia Hodgson, Candace Hastings, Valerie Balester, Nandra Perry, Laura Estill, and Marta Kvande. Florence Sarah Davies, intrepid and brilliant heroine of our life and times, and the University Writing Center were invaluable assets without which I would have been able to finish or manage deadlines. My sincere thanks to Desirae Embree for copyediting. For her role as my co-conspirator, co-editor, and eternally positive sounding board, I extend the highest of fives to Cait Coker. To my family, thank you for everything. To my dogs, you tried your best, but I finished it anyway. Most importantly, #thanksfortyping to my husband Tim for all of his invisible labor: making hundreds of pots of coffee, bringing my forgotten headphones at least eighteen times, walking the dogs, and cooking dinner more often than I can count while I plugged away in the office. Please never exploit me after I die like Samuel Briscoe did to Aphra Behn. v CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Margaret Ezell (chair), Maura Ives, and Mary Ann O’Farrell from the Department of English. The outside committee member was James Rosenheim from the Department of History. The student completed all work for this dissertation independently. Funding Sources Support for this dissertation was provided by the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies program, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Research support was also provided by the Beth Qualls ’89 Endowed Fellowship. In addition, I am deeply grateful to the Charles Montgomery Grey Fellowship at the Newberry Library, the Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship at the University of Chicago Special Collections and Research Center, and the Folger Shakespeare Library for providing research opportunities and support. Archival research was also completed at Houghton Library, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Center, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library. vi NOMENCLATURE BBTI British Book Trade Index ECCO Eighteenth-Century Collections Online EEBO Early English Books Online ESTC English Short Title Catalogue Plomer Henry Plomer’s Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers Term Catalogues Edward Arbor’s The Term Catalogues, 1668-1709 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER II TOWARD WOMEN’S BOOK HISTORY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ....................................................................................................................... 15 Book Historiography .................................................................................................... 18 Theorizing Feminist Bibliography ............................................................................... 28 Class, Gender, and Women’s Professional Authorship ............................................... 39 CHAPTER III BY MRS. A. BEHN: THE AUTHOR, THE BOOKSELLERS, AND THE BOOKS OF APHRA BEHN ................................................................................... 46 Behn’s Canon and Bibliographic History .................................................................... 51 Building Prestige: Publishing with the Tonsons .......................................................... 56 Radical Experimentation: Behn and William Canning ................................................ 76 CHAPTER IV PATRONAGE AND PUBLICATION IN DELARIVIER MANLEY’S CAREER .......................................................................................................................... 89 An Intimate Partnership: Manley and Barber, 1709-1714 ........................................... 93 A Meeting of the Minds: Manley and Curll in 1714 .................................................. 108 CHAPTER V “MISTRESS OF MULTIPLICITY”: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE PRODUCTION OF LITERARY CAPITAL ................................................................. 121 Evaluating Haywood’s Canon and Publishing Practices ........................................... 124 Haywood’s Network: Writing for Booksellers in the 1720s ...................................... 128 At the Sign of Fame: Eliza Haywood, Publisher? ...................................................... 142 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION ...................................................................................... 160 ENDNOTES ................................................................................................................... 163 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 172 APPENDIX A ................................................................................................................ 193 viii LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE Page 1 Graph of Aphra Behn’s publishing practices organized by year ................... 57 2 Eliza Haywood’s imprints from 1720-1724 organized by bookseller ......... 132 3 Eliza Haywood’s imprints from 1720-1724 grouping the booksellers Daniel Browne Jr. and Samuel Chapman together versus other partners .... 132 4 Eliza Haywood’s imprints from 1725-1739 organized by bookseller ......... 140 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This dissertation focuses on three women professional authors who wrote after the Restoration in England as case studies that interrogate the relationship between feminist literary studies and book history. Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood formed the core of women’s literary recovery efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. The three were linked together in one of the dedications to Haywood’s Love in Excess (1720) that deemed her the completion of the “fair triumvirate of wit.” Ros Balaster, Catherine Gallagher, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd not only brought their texts back into the critical conversation but created a literary history with these women at its core. Behn, Manley and Haywood were models of feminine
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