Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: “A Tribe of Authoresses” Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780‒1850 Series Editors: Professor Tim Fulford, De Montfort University Professor Alan Vardy, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY As befits a series published in the city of Roscoe and Rushden, a city that linked Britain to the transatlantic trade in cotton, in sugar, and in people, Romantic Reconfigurations reconfigures the literary and cultural geographies and histories of Romanticism. Topics featured include, but are by no means confined to, provincial and labouring-class writing, diasporic and colonial writing, natural history and other scientific discourse, journalism, popular culture, music and theatre, landscape and nature, cosmopolitanism and travel, poetics and form. Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism “A Tribe of Authoresses” Edited by: Andrew O. Winckles and Angela Rehbein Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2017 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2017 Liverpool University Press The right of Andrew O. Winckles and Angela Rehbein to be identified as the editors of this book have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-060-5 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-832-8 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors ix 1 Introduction: “A Tribe of Authoresses” 1 Andrew O. Winckles and Angela Rehbein 2 Sisters of the Quill: Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm 16 Andrew O. Winckles 3 Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick: Collaborative Campaigning in the Midlands, 1820–34 47 Felicity James and Rebecca Shuttleworth 4 Ageing, Authorship, and Female Networks in the Life Writing of Mary Berry (1763–1852) and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) 73 Amy Culley 5 The Female Authors of Cadell and Davies 99 Michelle Levy and Reese Irwin 6 Modelling Mary Russell Mitford’s Networks: The Digital Mitford as Collaborative Database 137 Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Kellie Donovan-Condron v Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism 7 The Citational Network of Tighe, Porter, Barbauld, Lefanu, Morgan, and Hemans 196 Harriet Kramer Linkin 8 Edgeworth’s Letters for Literary Ladies: Publication Peers and Analytical Antagonists 226 Robin Runia 9 Mary Shelley and Sade’s Global Network 245 Rebecca Nesvet 10 ‘Your Fourier’s Failed’: Networks of Affect and Anti-Socialist Meaning in Aurora Leigh 274 Eric Hood Afterword 298 Index 307 vi Acknowledgements Acknowledgements We would first like to thank Stephen C. Behrendt for inviting us to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities 2013 Summer Seminar on ‘Reassessing British Romanticism’, and for his unparalleled generosity and support as we saw this volume through from inception to completion. Were it not for the scholarly network forged at this seminar, this volume would not exist. We would also like to thank the other seminar members for the vigorous and challenging conversations that helped crystallize our interests in Romantic women’s voices. Thank you to Alan Vardy and Tim Fulford for inviting us to be a part of this exciting new series and for helping us refine our project, and thank you to Jenny Howard at Liverpool University Press for shepherding us through the production process. To all of our contributors, thank you for trusting us with your work and for making the process of assembling this volume so enjoyable. vii Notes on the Contributors Notes on the Contributors Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her book, Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011. Her published articles in ELH (English Literary History), Genre, Philological Quarterly, and The Wordsworth Circle investigate the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron. She is the architect of the Digital Mitford Project and other web-based digital humanities projects, and is working in conjunction with MITH’s Shelley-Godwin Archive, Romantic Circles, and Pittsburgh-based research team on collating the print and manuscript versions of Frankenstein in time for its bicentennial in 2018. She was elected in 2015 to serve on the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines. Amy Culley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor with Anna Fitzer of Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840 (Routledge, 2017), co-editor with Daniel Cook of Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Palgrave, 2012), and editor of Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, volumes 1–4 (Pickering & Chatto, 2009). She is currently researching narratives of ageing and old age in women’s life writing of the early nineteenth century. Kellie Donovan-Condron is a founding editor and Poetry section editor for the Digital Mitford Archive, a digital humanities project that is putting the poetry, historical drama, short prose sketches, and voluminous corre- spondence of nineteenth-century writer Mary Russell Mitford online. She ix Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism teaches intermediate literature, rhetoric, and foundation courses in the Arts and Humanities at Babson College outside Boston, MA. Her research interests are an interdisciplinary mix of literature, history, and material culture. Areas of particular interest include urban identity in the early nineteenth century, the gothic novel, women’s writing, consumerism and consumption in literature, Southern Gothic, and fairy tales. In the summer of 2013, she was selected to be a summer scholar in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar ‘Reassessing British Romanticism’. Eric Hood is an Assistant Professor at Adrian College and holds a PhD in English from the University of Kansas. He is a founding editor at The Digital Mitford. His scholarship focuses on British epic performances during the eighteenth and nineteenth century and cultural theory. Reese Irwin is a graduate student in English at Simon Fraser University. Her interests lie in Romantic era literature, women’s writing, the digital humanities, and print and manuscript culture. She is a research assistant on Dr. Michelle Levy’s Women’s Print History Project, 1750–1836, a bibliography encompassing women in print in the Romantic period. Her Master’s project, Compiling Sanditon, analyzes the trajectory of Jane Austen’s Sanditon from private, unfinished manuscript (as it was left upon Austen’s death in 1817), to its fragmentary and then complete publication in the early twentieth century. Felicity James is Associate Professor in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English literature at the University of Leicester, with research interests in Romantic friendship, sociability, and religious dissent. With postgraduate student Rebecca Shuttleworth, she is working on a project to recover and commemorate the lives and networks of Leicester abolitionists and campaigners Elizabeth Heyrick and Susanna Watts. Harriet Kramer Linkin is an Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at New Mexico State University, where she teaches courses in British Roman- ticism and women’s literature. She has published widely on Romantic-era writers (particularly William Blake and Mary Tighe) and is the editor of the first edition of Mary Tighe’s Verses Transcribed for H.T. (Romantic Circles, 2014), the first edition ofMary Tighe’s Selena: A Scholarly Edition (Ashgate, 2012), the first scholarly edition of The Collected Poems and Journals of Mary Tighe (UP Kentucky, 2005), and the co-editor (with Stephen C. Behrendt) of two collections on Romantic women poets: Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (UP Kentucky, 1999) and Approaches to Teaching Women Poets of the British Romantic Period (MLA, 1997). x Notes on the Contributors Michelle Levy is a Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. She works in the fields of Romantic literary history, print and manuscript culture, and women’s book history. She is the co-editor of the Broadview Reader in Book History (with Tom Mole, 2014) and the co-author of Broadview Introduction to Book History (with Tom Mole, 2017). She has published extensively on women writers, digital humanities and pedagogy, and has recently completed a book on literary manuscripts and manuscript culture of the Romantic period. She directs the Women’s Print History Project, 1750 –1836, a comprehensive bibliographical database of women’s books, and is working on a project that addresses the production and circulation of women’s books during this period. Rebecca Nesvet is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She has published in journals including Essays in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Journal, North Wind: A Journal of George Macdonald Studies, and Women’s Writing, as well as the Romantic