Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840 9781848935914, 9781315100418

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: editing women’s writing, 1670–1840
2 An ambitious and quixotic series: the ever-shifting role of the editor and the Chawton House Library Series
3 Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): making (and unmaking) a periodical ‘for women’
4 Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality
5 Annotating Delarivier Manley: stripping away preconceptions of gender and genre
6 Julie and Julia: tracing intertextuality in Helen Maria Williams’s novel
7 Romancing the past: women’s historical fiction, editorial pains and practices
8 A ‘Piece written by a Lady’: gender, anonymous authorship and editing The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760)
9 ‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?: editing women’s court memoirs
10 ‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’: editing women in the Chawton House Library Series
11 Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters in twenty-five volumes
12 ‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’: the rationale for a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters
Selected works cited
Index

Citation preview

Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840

This edited volume is the first to reflect on the theory and practice of editing women’s writing of the eighteenth century. The list of contributors includes experts on the fiction, drama, poetry, life writing, diaries and correspondence of familiar and lesser-known women, including Frances Burney, Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively, these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings, not only of the woman writer and women’s literary history, but also of our own editorial practice. Amy Culley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave, 2014), 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). Anna M. Fitzer is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Hull. She is editor of Alicia LeFanu’s novel, Strathallan (Pickering & Chatto, 2008), and of Memoirs of Women Writers Part I (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), a four-volume set in the Chawton House Library Series incorporating Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More, and Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer.

Chawton Studies in Scholarly Editing Series Editors: Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave

The Invention of Female Biography Gina Luria Walker Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840 Edited by Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer

Editing Women’s Writing, 1670–1840

Edited by Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Culley, Amy, editor. | Fitzer, Anna M., editor. Title: Editing women’s writing, 1670–1840 / edited by Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer. Description: New York: Routledge, 2017. | Series: Chawton studies in scholarly editing; 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017017909 (print) | LCCN 2017033822 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Editing. | English literature—Women authors— Criticism, Textual. | English literature—18th century—Criticism, Textual. | Women and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. | Authorship—History—18th century. | Criticism, Textual. Classification: LCC PN162 (ebook) | LCC PN162 .E24 2017 (print) | DDC 808.02/7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017909 ISBN: 978-1-8489-3591-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10041-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: editing women’s writing, 1670–1840

vii ix xiii 1

A my C ulley and A nna M . F it z er

2 An ambitious and quixotic series: the ever-shifting role of the editor and the Chawton House Library Series

18

L orna J . C lar k

3 Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746): making (and unmaking) a periodical ‘for women’

29

Kathryn R . King

4 Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality

43

Daniel Robinson

5 Annotating Delarivier Manley: stripping away preconceptions of gender and genre

60

R achel C arnell

6 Julie and Julia: tracing intertextuality in Helen Maria Williams’s novel

76

N atasha D u q uette

7 Romancing the past: women’s historical fiction, editorial pains and practices F iona P rice

96

vi Contents 8 A ‘Piece written by a Lady’: gender, anonymous authorship and editing The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760)

111

J ennie B atchelor and M egan H iatt

9 ‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?: editing women’s court memoirs

124

A my C ulley

10 ‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’: editing women in the Chawton House Library Series

139

A nna M . F it z er

11 Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters in twenty-five volumes

156

P eter S abor

12 ‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’: the rationale for a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters

172

C aroline F ran k lin and N icole P ohl

Selected works cited Index

192 197

List of figures

6.1 Joshua Reynolds, ‘Sarah (Kemble) Siddons as the Tragic Muse’ (1783–1784). 89 12.1 Elizabeth Montagu to James Beattie, 4 April 1774, A.L. S. 6 pp; MS 30.2.C.180, University Library, King’s College, Aberdeen, editorial deletions by Forbes, partially published in Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie: Including Many of his Original Letters, 2 vols (London: Printed for E. Roper, 1824), vol. 1, p. 339. 173

This page intentionally left blank

Notes on contributors

Jennie Batchelor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. She has published widely on eighteenth-century women’s writing, representations of gender, work, sexuality and the body, material culture studies and the eighteenth-century charity movement. Her most recent monograph is Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester University Press, 2010). She is currently writing a book on the place of The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) in Romantic print culture. Rachel Carnell, Professor of English at Cleveland State University, is the author of Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (Palgrave, 2006) and of A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). She is the co-editor of the five-volume Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (Pickering & Chatto, 2005) and the author of articles on Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Jane Austen and Anne Brontë. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection, Secret History in Literature 1660–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lorna J. Clark of Carleton University has published widely on women writers including Frances and Sarah Harriet Burney, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and George Eliot. She has recently edited volumes 3 and 4 of The Court Journals of Frances Burney (Clarendon Press, 2014) and The Diary of Lucy Kennedy in the Memoirs of the Court of George III (Pickering & Chatto, 2015). She is currently writing chapters for the Routledge Research Companion to Romantic Women Writers and The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-­C entury Novel, 1660–1820, and editing a volume of The Letters of Dr Charles Burney for Oxford University Press. Amy Culley is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave, 2014), 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

x  Notes on contributors currently researching narratives of ageing and old age in women’s life writing of the early nineteenth century. Natasha Duquette is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of English at Tyndale University College. She has edited two collections, Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology (Cambridge Scholars, 2007) and Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony (Lehigh University Press, 2013). Her writing has appeared in Jane Austen Sings the Blues (University of Alberta Press, 2009), Persuasions On-line and English Studies in Canada. For Pickering & Chatto, she produced an edition of Helen Maria Williams’s Julia, a novel interspersed with poetical pieces (2009). Her monograph Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation is forthcoming with Pickwick. Anna M. Fitzer is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Hull. She is editor of Alicia LeFanu’s novel, Strathallan (Pickering & Chatto, 2008), and of Memoirs of Women Writers Part I (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), a four-volume set in the Chawton House Library Series incorporating Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More, and Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer. ­Publications draw on a broader interest in women’s writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on the lives and literary affinities of the Sheridan and LeFanu families and their circles. Caroline Franklin is Professor of English at Swansea University. Her most recent books are The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (Pearson, 2010) and The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism (Routledge, 2013). She leads the AHRCfunded Elizabeth Montagu Letters Project, which aims at publishing a scholarly edition of the correspondence of the Bluestocking queen online (see http://elizabethmontaguletters.co.uk/). Megan Hiatt is an academic editor. She received her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2007, for a thesis analysing the Marriage Act of 1753 and mid-century depictions of nuptial regulation as a means of organizing the domestic sphere. She co-edited the anonymous novel The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House with Jennie Batchelor (Pickering & Chatto, 2007), making this unusual proto-feminist text available in a modern edition for the first time since its publication in 1759–1760. She currently works as a Production Editor for Taylor & Francis. Kathryn R. King is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Montevallo. Her research focuses on women’s lives, writings and professional careers in the long eighteenth century. Her books include A

Notes on contributors  xi Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Clarendon Press, 2000). She is co-editor (with Alexander Pettit) of Haywood’s Female Spectator  and has published articles in RES, ELH, JEMCS, The Eighteenth-Century, Studies in the Novel and other journals. She is ­currently working on periodical culture in the mid-eighteenth century. Nicole Pohl is Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University. She has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European salons and epistolarity, including The Letters of Sarah Scott (Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Fiona Price is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chichester. She has written widely on the aesthetics of political change, historical fiction, and the gothic and is author of Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Routledge, 2009) and Reinventing Liberty: Nation, Commerce, and the Historical Novel from Walpole to Scott (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). She is editor, with Benjamin Dew, of Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830: Visions of History (Palgrave, 2014) and has edited two historical novels, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (Broadview, 2007) and Sarah Green’s Private History of the Court of England (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). Daniel Robinson is Homer C. Nearing Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at Widener University and co-editor of A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750–1850 (Oxford University Press, 1999); Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the editor of Poems in The Works of Mary Robinson, 2 volumes (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and author of Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (University of Iowa Press, 2014), William Wordsworth’s Poetry: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2010) and The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (Palgrave, 2011). Peter Sabor is Canada Research Chair and Professor of English at McGill University, where he is also Director of the Burney Centre. His publications include The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and co-edited editions of Burney’s Cecilia, The Wanderer (for the Oxford World’s Classics series), her selected journals and letters and her collected plays. He is General Editor for Oxford University Press of The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, with five of six volumes published to date, and Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, of which the first of two volumes appeared in 2015.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements

This volume was inspired by a roundtable discussion at the conference ‘Pride & Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century’ which took place to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Chawton House Library in July 2013, and for this our thanks are due to the conference organizers, Gillian Dow and Jennie Batchelor. To our Series Editors, Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, we give our warmest thanks for their enthusiasm and advice. We would also like to thank Mark Pollard for supporting the project at Pickering & Chatto, staff at Routledge and colleagues in the libraries of the University of Hull and University of Lincoln. We are grateful for the support we have received from our families throughout the course of this project. Above all, we would like to extend our great thanks to our contributors for making the experience of ‘editing the editors’ both pleasurable and thought-provoking.

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction Editing women’s writing, 1670–1840 Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer

This volume of scholarly essays reflects upon the practice and theory of editing women’s writing of the long eighteenth century, presenting distinctive insights into projects dedicated to the ongoing recovery of women’s literary history and offering new perspectives on textual encounters between author, editor and reader. The volume was inspired by a roundtable at the conference, ‘Pride & Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century’, which took place at Chawton House Library in 2013. The conversation has since widened to include contributors who have edited volumes of women’s writing from across the long eighteenth century, ranging in scope from editions of Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood to the writing of Sarah Harriet Burney. Our editors reflect upon fiction, poetry, drama, correspondence, journals, memoirs, periodicals, roman à clefs and historical fiction, published in both print and electronic forms from 2001 to the present. Contributions examine the demands of editing female authors more familiar to a wider readership such as Elizabeth Montagu, Mary Robinson and Helen Maria Williams, as well as the challenges and opportunities presented by the recovery of authors such as Sarah Green, Charlotte Bury and Alicia LeFanu. The interpretative possibilities of editing works published anonymously and pseudonymously are considered across a range of genres. Collectively, these discussions examine the interrelation of editing and textual criticism and show how new editions might transform understandings, not only of the woman writer and women’s literary history, but also of our own editorial practice. In particular, our editors engage with issues central to the recovery project, including the complexities of gender and genre, models of female authorship, the relationship between women’s lives and texts, and women’s place within the literary tradition. Thinking in this context about what might be different about editing women writers, we can review our responsibilities, and explore future directions for editing women at a time when digitization projects and electronic databases continue to transform our interaction with writing from the past. There has been substantial expansion in the publication of modern reprints and scholarly editions of eighteenth-century texts by women,

2  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer produced over the last decades for a general and academic readership. These developments have helped to challenge women’s position as ­‘second-class citizens of the republic of letters’, to borrow ­Marilyn Butler’s evocative terms.1 The publishing initiatives of second-wave feminism declared a commitment to the promotion and improved circulation of women writers in a history informed by ideological and commercial imperatives. 2 Virago, perhaps the most well-known press dedicated to female-authored texts, was established in 1973 by Carmen Callil and, through its Modern Classics series, conferred renewed status upon women writers predominantly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Works encompassing fiction and non-fiction included new introductions, many contributed by practising women writers. Between 1986 and 1989 Virago made a significant step in the recovery of writing by women of our period, beginning with reprints of Susan ­Ferrier’s Marriage (1818), Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) which, with an introduction by Jane Spencer, was ‘the first reissue […] since the eighteenth century.’3 Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684–1687) followed in 1987, and finally Austen’s six novels – all of which were introduced by Margaret Drabble. Though by the early 1980s Virago had desisted with ‘the clarion call that had initially heralded each title – “Virago is a feminist company”’ – Lorna Stevens observes that ‘as a publishing house it resurrected, rediscovered, marketed and published, with commendable aplomb “women’s writing”, both past and present, and in so doing it has made a significant contribution to women’s rich yet often obscured literary and intellectual heritage.’4 If it became less overtly polemical than other presses and women’s magazines established in this period, Virago’s mutually effective processes of selection and promotion made women’s writing of the past accessible in affordable paperback editions to a broad readership. Virago’s excursion into early women’s writing coincided with the emergence of ‘Reprint fiction from the Pandora Press’, the comparatively modest descriptor for Mothers of the Novel, a series of twenty reset novels covering the period 1749–1834. One of the earliest of these was Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751, 1986), introduced by Dale Spender. Spender’s influential monograph, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (Pandora, 1986), was advertised as a companion to the series which, between 1986 and 1989, called upon other women writers and scholars, including Jeanette W ­ interson, Fay ­Weldon and Janet Todd, to contribute short introductions. The suggestion of a dialogue between women editors and their eighteenth-century ­forbears was a concept Sue Townsend cleverly adapted to her own introduction to Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761, 1987). Writing it as a ‘Fan Letter to a Dead Writer’, Townsend is directly addressing Sheridan with all the disarming frankness of her own fictional diarist,

Introduction  3 Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ (though he would have been aged 20¾ by 1987), while conveying to other grown-up readers the principal, and often challenging aspects of Sheridan’s short life. Pandora Press did not quite publish the 100 novels in its sights, but it did enable ‘many people and many academic and public libraries to acquire the works of Austen’s teachers’, and made way for their inclusion on taught courses. 5 This impetus to make available early women writers was at the same time shared by both feminist scholars, committed to challenging the canon of eighteenth-century literary studies, and scholarly publishers, for whom a comprehensive editorial apparatus was a priority. Pickering & Chatto have been leaders in the production of extensively annotated editions since the 1980s when the emphasis centred upon the re-­publication of writers of the Romantic period and later nineteenth century. The seven-­volume Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Butler and Todd (1989), and Todd’s The Works of Aphra Behn (1992–1996) were early interventions in the publisher’s Pickering Masters, which further represented women in a series focused upon the published correspondence, and collected works of authors in multi-­volume sets. Its editions of Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley amongst others, complemented individual volumes included in Pickering Women’s Classics, a series also established in the 1990s and edited by Todd. Encompassing a diversity of genres – poems, novels, biography and translations – it ranged across the seventeenth- eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries for its selection of lesser-known titles by familiar and neglected women writers. Eighteenth-­Century Novels by Women was a series founded in this period and edited by Isobel Grundy for the University Press of Kentucky. Though more focused in its remit, it would also cover the long eighteenth century (1680–1830) with print editions of ten works from such as Mary Davys, Elizabeth Griffith, Frances Brooke and Charlotte Smith, complete with explanatory endnotes and lists of emendations. Fine scholarly volumes available in paperback, these were designed as good student copies which, along with Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics, made a broad range of eighteenth-century female and male writers increasingly accessible. Broadview Press, an independent academic publisher established in 1985, has also developed an impressively wide-ranging catalogue. Broadview Editions currently include titles by at least thirty-­ five female novelists and dramatists of our period and, in addition to under-represented female voices, the publisher can make good claim to establishing across multiple volumes a particular author’s body of work. From Margaret Cavendish and Susan Centlivre, to Mary Hays and Mary Shelley, writers are presented in the context of the relevant historical extracts typically incorporated in each volume. Pickering & Chatto’s commitment to the recovery in print of rare and undervalued texts was developed in its inauguration of the Chawton House Library Series in 2007. Pickering & Chatto’s partnership with

4  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer Chawton House Library, an independent research library and study centre (and formerly the home of Austen’s brother, Edward), aimed to enhance the scope and range of writing by and about women in the long eighteenth century through three strands: Women’s Novels; Women’s Memoirs; and Women’s Travel Writing. This has since been extended to include a fourth strand: Scholarly Editing. Such attention to a variety of authors and modes of writing has served to promote enquiry into the interrelation of women writers beyond the parameters of chronology or genre, by which their significance or contribution might otherwise be defined. Such projects complement the achievements of works in the field which have recently re-focused attention upon literary correspondence and manuscripts to a greater extent.6 The scholarly edition’s dual emphasis upon making available a text which is further variously discovered through extensive editorial annotation and introductions, headnotes and details of textual variants, advances our understanding of women’s literary cultures and enables fresh insights into their networks and coteries. Clearly, much has been done since the mid-1990s to answer Butler’s call that: ‘we must have true scholarly editions of a significant body of women’s writing, not only to grasp the internal dynamics of an individual career, but to understand its group dynamics, its inter-­relations with society and history.’7 When Butler’s essay ‘Editing Women’ was published in 1995, innovations in electronic editions were taking shape. In 1996, Chadwyck-­ Healey’s CD-Rom Eighteenth-Century Fiction – since made available online – announced access to a full-text, searchable database of a selection of novels published between 1700 and 1780 and included, amongst its thirty authors, women writers such as Manley and Haywood, as well as Sarah Fielding, Frances Sheridan and Clara Reeve. Haywood, who appears twice as a novelist in Kentucky’s Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, is also doubly recognized – in an edition of her fiction and drama, and in another dedicated to The Female Spectator – as part of Women Writers in English 1350–1850, published by Oxford University Press. This print publication, replete with full introductions and concise footnotes, represents novels, poetry, drama, correspondence and other non-fiction across fifteen volumes derived from Brown University’s highly innovative Women Writers Project. Established in 1988, and now operating from Northeastern University, the project’s adoption of early technologies in digital transcription in the creation of a full-text database, and harnessing of developments in text encoding, led to the launch in 1999 of Women Writers Online. Thomson Gale’s 2004 Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, as a full-text, fully searchable successor to Early English Books Online, has enabled the further contextualization of women’s writing, boasting in excess of 150,000 titles published across a range of disciplines between 1701 and 1800. Furthermore, the database, British Fiction 1800–1829, draws upon the Corvey collection, which comprises titles published

Introduction  5 mainly between 1796 and 1834, and the facsimile Corvey Microfiche Edition has formed the basis of Corvey Women Writers on the Web. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, exemplifies continued scholarly commitment to the creation of a digital history through which both print and online editions might be further understood. Access to resources such as ECCO and Orlando, for example, is made possible through subscription, and the relative expense is more likely to be met by university libraries and research institutions than general readers. In this respect, the reach of searchable online full-text databases of women’s writing is commensurate with that of the scholarly print edition, though these do typically aspire to the objectives outlined by Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman, General Editors of Women Writers in English 1350–1850. Editions in this series aim at a wide audience, from the informed undergraduate through professional students of literature, and they attempt to include the general reader who is interested in exploring a fuller tradition of early texts in English than has been available through the almost exclusively male canonical tradition.8 This tentative step toward the democratization of access to rare texts, has, however, arguably been achieved more fully by a different kind of enterprise in the form of, amongst others, Google Books and Internet Archive. Readers in almost any location can view a digital image and, in the case of archive.org, turn the pages of a virtual book. Such digital facsimiles generate opportunities for the ‘general reader’ to engage in that ‘fuller tradition’, although not, in all cases, with reference to the extensive editorial apparatus which print and sophisticated online editions additionally provide.9 The extent to which ‘particular editions’ have ‘particular purposes and particular audiences’ is an issue that Isobel Grundy raised over twenty years ago, as editor of the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Grundy’s expected audience for Montagu’s Complete Letters was ‘the users of reference libraries’ whose needs she privileged in her approach to annotation. Nonetheless, Grundy argues that ‘private people and common readers […] deserve a correct, authentic text just as much as library users do’.10 The ways in which particular editions make texts accessible to new audiences and challenge the traditional canon have been discussed in more recent times by Stuart Curran, who provides an alternative perspective to Grundy in emphasizing our responsibilities to an author as well as to her readers. In an essay comparing electronic media and print editions in the twenty-first century, Curran acknowledges that text databases ‘constitute an overwhelming affront to an historical, arbitrarily

6  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer reified, and implicitly sexist canon’. But in turning to his experiences as General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto fourteen-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith (2005–2007), he contends that while the burgeoning in Smith scholarship was dependent upon the ‘breadth’ of ‘availability’ of her work ‘in electronic textbases’, nonetheless the scholarly print edition was ‘essential’ to Smith’s ‘cultural grounding’ and recovery of her literary reputation.11 It is in considering the implications of enhanced accessibility to books and their authors, that, in the first essay of our collection, Lorna J. Clark reiterates the importance of the editor-as-guide. In this capacity, editors enable the reader to appreciate the particular riches of the vast treasure trove of texts offered by these multiple sources, and to evaluate them in terms of important biographical, historical and cultural contexts. It is a role which does, however, assume a different orientation in the paperless environment of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800): Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition, which is discussed in our final essay. Alert to arguments which give rise to the clear need to ‘distinguish between a digital edition and a virtual archive’, Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl commit to the democratization of access, at the same time that they aim to ‘minimize elitism by offering the viewer the availability but not the necessity of consulting explanatory notes and scholarly apparatus.’ The viewer – with all the close attention and scrutiny that the term implies – is here given the responsibility to choose when, and if, to avail themselves of the editor’s guidance on the various contexts in which this material might be read. The history of editing women has clearly served not only to challenge the status of the woman writer as ‘second-class citizen’, but also to reflect upon the dynamics of the relationship between her text, her editor and her reader. This flourishing of editorial practice has been accompanied by a re-­focusing of interest in textual scholarship in recent years, particularly in its relationship to literary theory and criticism and in the transformative effects of digital forms. But despite this context, there has been less emphasis on editing women’s writing, and no volume ­devoted specifically to editing women of the long eighteenth century. As a consequence, ‘­editorial theory and practice continue to privilege a high-literary canon’, as Alexander Pettit argues, based on the assumption of a substantial ­archive characterized by ‘documentary profusion’, an established author and an extensive critical tradition of interpretation.12 The editing practices of the new bibliography, associated with early twentieth-­century textual scholar W. W. Greg and subsequently Fredson Bowers, emphasized a scientific approach to editing by comparing multiple textual variants and production processes, and attending to authorial intent, in pursuit of an ideal text.13 Greg’s conception of a scholarly critical edition was

Introduction  7 to present the text, so far as the available evidence permits, in the form in which we may suppose that it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself, of the work as he finally intended it.14 Subsequent challenges to the new bibliography since the 1980s include a reconception of the text ‘as a collaborative and social product’ (a position most closely associated with the work of Jerome J. McGann), in which authorial intent is ‘just one in a sequence of textual negotiations’.15 Most recently, the focus has shifted to the ‘problems and possibilities of the digital’, including the potential of collaborative editing, an interactive relationship with readers, the incorporation of editorial debate into the edition itself, and the difference a digital edition might make to editing various genres, or texts only available in manuscript.16 In theorizing the scholarly edition, Hans Walter Gabler argues that, in the move from book to the digital medium, ‘all the main a priori assumptions about scholarly editions come into question.’17 Our volume is a timely intervention in a critical history of editing which, though inspiring important scholarly work, has rather overlooked the insights generated by editorial projects focusing exclusively on women’s writing.18 A welcome exception to such neglect is Editing Women (1998), which begins a conversation between editors of women writers from the medieval period to the twentieth century, with significant contributions on the eighteenth century by Isobel Grundy and Margaret Anne Doody.19 The important questions posed in these essays are returned to in our volume over twenty years on from the 1995 ‘Conference on Editorial Problems’ from which Editing Women emerged. Presciently, Grundy and Doody address the influence of editing on the recovery project and the literary canon, an edition’s ability to reshape the critical narratives of individual authors, the roles and assumptions of the editor at different historical moments, the contingency and instability of the edited text, how editing women writers offers new perspectives on editing works by male authors and the impact of new technology. It is notable that editors of early modern women writers are further ahead in theorizing their practice, and their groundbreaking work suggests how focusing on women might reframe existing editorial debates. In an essay of 2010, Margaret J. M. Ezell highlights how early modern texts that survive in a unique copy can ‘resist or repel the traditional models for determining how a manuscript should be edited’, since these models have tended to place significant emphasis on the editor’s role in working with multiple textual variants. Focusing on the specific challenges of editing manuscripts that represent a distinct mode of authorship, she asks the question: ‘are there issues raised by early modern women’s manuscript materials which are not usefully addressed by current principles and practices of editing early modern manuscripts

8  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer for print?’20 Ann Hollinshead Hurley and Chanita Goodblatt’s Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (2009) has shown the author-centred approach of the new bibliography to be inadequate to the challenges of editing early modern women. By contrast, these editors have found potential in the practices of ‘new textualist editing’, inspired by McGann, as an approach that emphasizes ‘the social, political, economic, class, gender and cultural positioning of a text’ and ‘resituates its author as only one among the many ways through which a text is constituted as it interacts with its social and cultural locations.’21 That this is a critical moment for assessing ‘editing women’, is further exemplified by new collections of essays (both published after our volume went to press); Editing Early Modern Women (2016), and The Invention of Female Biography (2017) which focuses on the ‘editorial challenges’ and ‘innovative responses’ of over 150 scholars who collaborated to produce a modern scholarly edition of Mary Hays’s Female Biography in 2013. 22 These conversations also have important implications for our approaches to editing male writers whose works do not fit comfortably within traditional paradigms. Furthermore, they address the future, for as Ezell convincingly argues, if we transfer ‘older critical terms and textual conceptualizations into a new editorial media’ we risk continuing to select authors with vast archives of materials for our digital editions at the expense of a richer, messier textual history of ‘“books behaving badly”’. 23 The present collection is concerned with what Michelle Warren has termed ‘the politics of textual scholarship’, in its interest in textual selection, dissemination and the production of editions, and the relationship between textual scholarship, literary history and gender. 24 Our editors highlight the ‘broader cultural dynamics’ in which their editions were produced and disseminated and, at the same time, recognize the critical contingency and provisionality of their own work within the ongoing lifetime of the text. 25 As Kathryn Sutherland argues, ‘all editorial theories imply the authority to represent or speak as the text; and all are ultimately revealed as temporal and temporary protocols for interpretation.’26 A brisk survey of contemporary scholarship on editing reveals the role of the editor variously and creatively imagined as travel guide, cartographer, friend, collaborator, curator, custodian, scavenger, interloper, archaeologist, time-traveller, gold-miner, rescuer, healer and code-breaker, a choice influenced in many cases by the particular demands placed on the editors by the texts and authors with which they work. Despite this metaphorical variety, common to all the essays in our collection is an awareness of the transformative potential and power of the editor in their mediation of the text, a commitment to reflecting critically on our duties and responsibilities and a desire to avoid what one contributor calls the ‘hubris of presentism’ and another, quoting E. P. Thompson, the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. 27

Introduction  9 Transformation is of course intrinsic to the process of recovery. This is particularly the case for genres which are thought to have been taken less seriously by publishers, readers and critics, or where attending only to a narrow range of an author’s work has distorted critical narratives of women’s literary careers. For some of our editors, a fuller sense of the potential of their edition, and the particular nature of their contribution to the text’s remaking, was created by their awareness of the project’s literary afterlife – of its reception by, and effect upon, readers. Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman’s Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (2005) sought to establish Manley as an inventive writer of political history, pamphlets and periodicals, as well as a dramatist and a novelist. In her essay for this volume, Carnell remarks upon how the attention she was able to give to the detail of allusions in Manley’s epistolary fiction, resonated with another scholar working on her comedies. This enabled renewed understanding of the correspondences there to be traced across Manley’s otherwise seemingly disparate texts, and signified as a collaborative effort – editor and critical reader engaging in a time-lapsed repositioning of significance. The estrangement of the text through editing is also identified in an earlier essay by Butler, who, as editor of The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth (1999–2003), found the books ‘defamiliarized’. Butler identifies her own shifting perspectives as Edgeworth’s biographer, who ‘mined’ the works ‘to bring out their role in the author’s bildung or psychodrama’, and as Edgeworth’s editor, whose interaction with the texts demanded a different kind of attention. 28 In this volume, a similar thread is evident in Kathryn R. King’s discussion of her edition of Eliza Haywood’s periodical, The Female Spectator, which was published as part of the Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (2001–2002). King notes that ‘attention to minute detail required by the editing process served to unmake […] the received ideas’ she herself ‘brought to the project’. She shared Rachel Carnell’s experience of being creatively in dialogue with readers who, in the case of Female Spectator, were able to bring more fully to the surface the shimmering logic her own efforts, as editor, had begun to suggest. What had appeared in prospect as a fairly mechanical process, typing, or ‘keystroking’ the text word for word, was productive of a much more intimate understanding of its potential coherence. She was already in the process of disturbing perceptions of Haywood as a hack writer, but in retrospect produced an edition of Female Spectator which inspired its readers to further ‘teach me’, as she puts it, ‘the sophisticated achievements of the work I had edited’. King’s articulation of the opportunities and responsibilities inherent in attending to the ‘minute detail’ resonates with earlier arguments put forward by Grundy regarding her edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Grundy sets the scene for our later editors in her own ‘full identification of everyone [Montagu’s] letters mention’. This approach

10  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer is commensurate with her assertion of the editor’s duty ‘to the scholarly community at large’, as she rather wonderfully evokes the ‘treasure-house or junk-shop of knowledge which we all frequent.’ For, ‘somewhere in those junk-heaps’ she argues, ‘there may even lie an unexpected further link between’ – in her case – Lady Mary and the seemingly inconsequential ‘Jane Bloggs which will one day make the original information acutely relevant after all’. 29 In this volume, Natasha Duquette suggests how preparing the first annotated edition of Helen Maria Williams’s Julia (1790) and attending to its allusions and intertextuality helped to establish Williams within a web of intriguing and, at times, unexpected textual connections. These fresh insights into Williams’s composition methods and literary influences offer a detailed case study of how editing might enable us to grasp those ‘group dynamics’ and ‘inter-relations’ of individual careers, identified by Butler. For Duquette, the editor accentuates her subject’s ‘dialogic interpersonal encounters with other writers, whose traces are left embedded in the published text’, and is given pause for reflection on the significance of ‘intertextual absences or silences’. This shift in emphasis upon women’s careers and influences serves to realign their significance in relation to ostensibly male literary traditions. Lorna J. Clark demonstrates in her essay how the recirculation of a rare text such as Sarah Harriet Burney’s The Romance of Private Life (1839), which has not been in print since the first edition, can challenge assumptions about the patriarchal origins of crime fiction. The neglected Burney is here recovered as an innovative precursor to Wilkie Collins. Fiona Price, as editor of Sarah Green’s The Private History of the Court of England (1808) and Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), similarly suggests in her essay that the challenges inherent in editing, in her case, historical fiction, require us to rethink the critical heritage of a genre. By sympathetically locating unfamiliar works by women within generic contexts, Price creates an edition that establishes them within e­ ighteenth-century literary culture, rather than as part of a counter-culture. New opportunities to explore ideas of female community and ­critical conjunctions between writers are also made possible through collected editions that move away from the author as their organizing ­principle. Multi-volume editions which bring together authors whose lives and writing interconnect in creative collaboration complement ­existing editing projects focusing on literary networks such as ­Bluestocking ­Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785 (1999) and Non ­Conformist Women Writers, 1720–1840 (2011). Grouping women’s texts in edited sets on the basis of genre also allows us to recover works by women who in some cases made only a single appearance in print. Amy Culley recounts in her essay her experience of editing two texts within a multi-volume set of Women’s Court and Society Memoirs (2009) as part of the Chawton House Library Series: Women’s Memoirs. She suggests that in this company, the individual memoirists ‘appear less

Introduction  11 as anomalous eccentrics and more as participants in a neglected, hybrid genre’ whose texts connect to earlier semi-autobiographical forms in amatory fiction, secret histories and scandalous memoirs. These instances of ‘scholarly remaking’, to take Kathryn R. King’s phrase, amount ‘to a compelling argument for critical editions of understudied works from the edges’. In contrast to those more elusive women writers recovered in Culley’s editions of the court memoir, Frances Burney presented a different kind of editorial challenge for Peter Sabor. In an essay reflecting the profusion of Burney’s writings, Sabor describes the founding of the Burney Project at ­McGill ­University and reconstructs a rich history of the editing process. Over 10,000 manuscript pages of Burney’s journals and letters are extant, spanning the years 1768 to 1839 from across more than 150 archives. The story of their recovery suggests the contingency of editions that are not only shaped by familial, institutional and commercial pressures, but also often reliant on the tenacity of individual editors and collaborations over time. As Sabor argues, it is through publication of recently d ­ iscovered or newly a­ ccessible ­ ismissed as ‘drafts’ and a material, the re-evaluation of letters previously d commitment to restoring material to its original form, that the journals and letters enable fresh insights into Burney’s private and ­professional life. The interrelation of editing and biography is addressed in Anna M. Fitzer’s reflections in this volume on Memoirs of Women Writers Part I (2012), a four-volume set incorporating titles focusing upon the lives and works of Frances Sheridan, Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer. Memoirs enables us to situate our own editorial contribution to the process of recovery in terms of earlier Romantic-era acts of remembrance. In her discussion of Alicia LeFanu’s work on Sheridan, and of William Roberts on More, Fitzer explores the complexities attendant upon the construction and reception of life writing in this period, and the implications for later understandings of literary reputation. The modern editor, editing the life of the biographical subject, she argues, is also editing the biographer through whom that life is mediated. In the case of LeFanu, it is a practice which fosters renewed scrutiny of two female literary authorities, and reveals, in the context of other female experience as described and expressed across the set, the intersections of writing lives. The role of the editor as ‘a kind of highly specialized biographer’ perhaps ‘really a kind of primary biographer’ is acknowledged by Margaret Anne Doody. As an editor of Frances Burney’s writing, and as her biographer engaged ‘in the fascinating if dangerous game of making sense of a life’, Doody reflects upon biography as ‘a pointer to the works’. She also observes that biography ‘allows the inclusion of material for which the world is not yet ready, which may not be “important” enough to find its way into any anthology.’30 The editor who advances the arguments for the recognition of such importance not only adds to the writings in print, but also prompts a return to the life; the ‘sense’ of which can alter in the light of the achievements of newly edited works. There is therefore a reciprocal relationship between biography and editing, and it is notable

12  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer that biographies of Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley, to give only a selection, were written by their editors. Behn’s biographer, Janet Todd, observes that, ‘indeed by the end of editing, a kind of contextual biography has been written or implied by the choice of works and by the footnotes.’31 As the biographer of Edgeworth, Butler had placed the argument for our continued production of new editions precisely in relation to life writing. Likewise, the editing practices represented across this volume – that seek to explore texts beyond any preconditioned sense of authorial reputation – bring into view her sense of ‘the biographical realities’. Each new edition is, Butler argues, ‘a comparative exercise’, alerting the reader to ‘interpretative insights’, and leading, quite possibly, to a new biography. 32 As the basis for renewed biographical perspectives, many of the projects discussed in our volume draw attention to what have been, historically, competing editorial imperatives to suppress, preserve or restore to an ‘original’ form private epistolary confidences. Peter Sabor recounts the effort required to undo Burney’s active attempts to groom papers which were then subject to further ‘disfiguring’ by her editors. The material in his editions consequently became ‘rougher and less elegant’, though ‘far closer to the original state of Burney’s journals and letters’ as sent to her correspondents during her lifetime. Sabor’s comparative account of how successive editions have served Burney’s expansive archive resonates with Fitzer’s discussion of William Roberts, whose redaction of Hannah More’s papers in his Memoirs of the 1830s antagonized her later biographers. As Fitzer argues, however, such a text is important to debates about earlier methodologies and literary authority. In a new edition, it is a version which is, itself, unique and ‘intrinsic to understandings of the history of editorial practices, and of making and shaping literary legacies.’ The quality of the archive in the case of women writers in particular is a question Daniel Robinson addresses when discussing, in this volume, his role as the author of a book-length study of Mary Robinson’s poetry, and as her editor. Advancing an argument for the symbiotic relationship of editing and literary criticism, he values the edition in principle as that which stimulates the growth of our industry as thinkers and tutors. New editions inspire scholarly innovation, as the essays of Carnell and King advocate. But the quality of such editions is, in Robinson’s view, contingent upon the scope of the archive to which we must be able to return. As Sabor’s experience reflects, an archive is – and remains in ­potentia – the beneficiary of materials discovered by successive generations of editors, collectors and accidental custodians of long-buried literary gold. But the writer without an archive is, for Robinson, a writer who remains precariously poised at the edges. That this is a particular problem facing editors of women’s writing is an enticing proposition with which many other essays across this collection engage. Rachel ­Carnell, for example, acknowledges the considerable differences entailed

Introduction  13 in the editing of Manley as opposed to Wordsworth. These differences are, in part, determined by the relative limitations of the archive but, for her, it does not follow that such limitations are typically gendered. Though material evidence – in the form of handwritten manuscripts, author copies of works, annotations and revisions – would seem requisite to an authoritative edition, Carnell argues that a relatively impoverished archive is no bar to that edition’s commitment to revealing the riches of any author’s work. Debates concerning editing women are further complicated by works published anonymously, or pseudonymously. The decisions as described by editors in this volume on how best to introduce texts where attribution may be doubtful or insecure are part of critical considerations of what to do with ‘Anon.’, now recognized as an integral if troublesome figure in the history of women’s writing.33 Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt are co-editors of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760), the first of Chawton House Library’s Women’s Novels, published in 2007. Their essay recalls how ‘reluctance to assign an author in the absence of definitive evidence’ initially ‘proved an insurmountable obstacle’ to publication. They recognize that ‘attribution has been central to [the] recovery project’ enabling ‘us to talk about the achievements of individual women writers and, in many instances, to chart the longevity of their careers and their often extraordinary versatility’. However, their project also reveals the ‘limitations that a biographical focus places on editors, and the freedom to engage with the text and its author’s artistry that anonymity generates.’ It is a perspective shared by Amy Culley who, as editor of court memoirs, worked with texts which ‘play with authorial identity, deploy anonymity and pseudonymity self-reflexively as textual strategies’ and are ­‘characterized by publication histories that complicate their place within a history of ­female authorship.’ For all three editors, these enigmatic works provide a welcome opportunity to consider how such innovative uses of anonymity and pseudonymity, and their complex reception in the period, reconfigure relationships between reader, author and text, and demand alternative editorial approaches. In our final essay Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl demonstrate the ways in which new technologies enable us to reimagine the scholarly edition in the twenty-first century. They look forward to the ‘pioneering research’ The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) is set to promote, and describe this Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition as designed to enable academics, students and members of the public access to a virtual single archive of Montagu’s far-flung papers. Led by Franklin, The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu is a digitization project made possible by significant technological advances in data management and analysis of the last two decades. It is to be hosted by Swansea University with a view to a platform being maintained for

14  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer ‘freely accessible scholarly digital editions’. Those dialogic encounters, described by many of our editors, are there to be traced by the general reader and the literary scholar for whom the rewards will be reciprocal. As Franklin and Pohl argue, ‘Democratizing the archive and facilitating research on it is what a digitized scholarly edition can brilliantly achieve.’ It is in light of our emphasis upon what women writers have achieved, and consideration of what we, as editors, might achieve for them, that we return in conclusion to the reader. Whether our editors are working with print or digital transcription; whether editorial comment is considered as a necessity or a distraction, the recovery project has now served to place us at a unique vantage point from which to investigate further critical strategies for understanding those writers for whom editors have garnered recognition. If this is a proposition with which all of our contributors have variously engaged, it is also one which the digital revolution has made more urgent. Alongside approaches which emphasize the integration of newly recovered writers and their texts within existing literary paradigms, and those which complicate established organizing principles, a different kind of critical practice is in prospect as a consequence of enhanced access to multiple virtual, fully searchable, editions that enable new ways of reading. Digital archives of epistolary correspondence, for instance, can alter the scope and profile of women’s literary communities as they have been hitherto understood; literally and figuratively putting writers in touch with others in previously unimagined ways. The development of such initiatives in tandem with open-access policy means that the cartographer is no longer a role necessarily exclusive to the editor, but one potentially shared by the general reader too. As we hope this collection demonstrates, the particular experiences of individual editors cohere as contributions to our developing understanding of editing women. We have aimed to incorporate a range of editorial practices, an ambition which evokes, in part, the many layers of previous editorial interventions traced by our contributors in individual texts, to suggest a dynamic and, at times, contested history of editing women’s writing. This has revealed differences in approach and in conceptions of the role of the editor, but considerations of the sustainability and preservation of texts have also highlighted affinities in editorial strategy, and between the printed and digitized text as a medium of transmission. From the early paperback editions with their strikingly decorative covers to the ‘handsome and durable’ scholarly volumes of Pickering & Chatto – encased in binding which, to quote Butler, ‘brilliantly contrives to be both plain and plainly expensive’ – paper editions of women’s writing have conveyed tangible signs of intrinsic significance. 34 The virtual edition marks a move beyond the material object, but also shares in the printed text’s imperative both to preserve and disseminate writing from

Introduction  15 the past. Future directions in women’s writing may diversify from the material and virtual transcription of texts as represented in our volume, but continuity of investment, and of a commitment to the inclusiveness of the recovery project, remain essential to the preservation of its achievements for the next generation.

Notes 1 M. Butler, ‘Editing Women’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, 27:3 (1995), pp. 273–83, on p. 273. 2 These coincided with other series established in the 1970s, such as ­Garland’s The Flowering of the Novel: Representative Mid-Eighteenth Century Fiction 1740–1775 and Foundations of the Novel: Representative Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Incorporating in excess of 220 titles, these facsimiles importantly enabled readers to discover both ‘minor’ male and female writers of the period. 3 L. Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 163. 4 L. Stevens, ‘Telling Tales of Virago Press’, in S. Brown (ed.), Consuming Books: The Marketing and Consumption of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 160–66, on pp. 162, 165. 5 M. Sandock, ‘Mothers of the Novel: Rediscovering Early Women Writers’, Cresset, 54:5 (1991), pp. 10–14, on p. 11. 6 Selected examples include, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), edited by Janet Todd; Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree, and Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012), edited by Linda Bree, ­Peter Sabor and Janet Todd. 7 Butler, ‘Editing Women’, p. 274. 8 S. Woods and E. H. Hageman, Foreword, in C. Shiner Wilson (ed.), The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. ix–x, on p. x. 9 For around a third of the women writers of the long eighteenth century listed in Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British Women Writers (1989) who published more than one text, we can now read a variety of their works in scholarly editions. However, if we add the criteria of affordability and accessibility, then this figure falls to just below a quarter. See J. Todd, Dictionary of British Women Writers (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 10 I. Grundy, ‘Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’, in A. M. Hutchison (ed.), Editing Women: Papers given at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3–4 November 1995 (­Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 55–78, on p. 59. 11 S. Curran, ‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 82–8, on p. 86. 12 A. Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts, “Marginal” Works, and the Mandate of the Moment: The Case of Eliza Haywood’, TSWL, 22:2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 293– 314, on p. 296. 13 For a more detailed and nuanced discussion of the differences between Greg and Bowers’s position, see K. Sutherland, ‘Anglo-American Editorial Theory’, in N. Fraistat and J. Flanders (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 42–60.

16  Amy Culley and Anna M. Fitzer 14 W. W. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. x. 15 N. Fraistat and J. Flanders, ‘Introduction: Textual Scholarship in the Age of Media Consciousness’, in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 1–15, on p. 5; D. Greetham, ‘A History of Textual Scholarship’, in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 16–41, on p. 37. See also, J. J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986). 16 Fraistat and Flanders, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 17 H. W. Gabler, ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 43–56, on p. 43. 18 The relative emphasis on canonical male writers in works of editorial theory published since the 1980s is evident in the following examples: Jerome J. McGann’s collected edition, Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) incorporates ten essays on textual editing ranging from Langland and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Byron, to the contemporary American novel; Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, edited by George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) also prioritizes Shakespeare, along with the nineteenth-century novel, and modernist fiction. Its inclusion of an essay on Mary Shelley is echoed in Alexander Pettit’s edited collection, Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). The representation of women writers is further addressed with an essay on the early twentieth-­century author, Willa Cather. The eighteenth century is recognized as a significant period in the history of editing and bibliographical scholarship in both Marcus Walsh’s Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and the more recent collection edited by Jesse G. Swan, Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014). Swan’s volume includes insights on Frances Burney and Samuel Johnson, and both Johnson and John Clare are the subjects of editorial projects acknowledged in Walsh’s The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton, edited with Ian Small (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 2006). 19 A. M. Hutchison (ed.), Editing Women: Papers given at the Thirty-First ­A nnual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3–4 ­November 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 20 M. J. M. Ezell, ‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 102–9, on p. 103. Ezell’s article is one of ten to address ‘Scholarly Editing in the Twenty-First Century’, in a special issue, which also incorporates discussion of editions of Mary Shelley and Charlotte Smith. 21 A. Hollinshead Hurley and C. Goodblatt (eds), ‘Preface’, Women Editing/ Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. xi–xviii, on pp. xi–xii. 22 S. C. E. Ross and P. Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); G. Luria Walker (ed.), The Invention of Female Biography (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2017). 23 Ezell, ‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts’, pp. 108, 106.

Introduction  17 24 M. R. Warren, ‘The Politics of Textual Scholarship’, in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 119–34. 25 Warren, ‘Politics of Textual Scholarship’, p. 124. 26 Sutherland, ‘Anglo-American Editorial Theory’, p. 48. 27 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), p. 12. 28 Butler, ‘Editing Women’, p. 279. 29 Grundy, ‘Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’, p. 59. 30 Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Response’, in Editing Women, pp. 125–40, on p. 129. 31 J. Todd, ‘“Pursue that way of fooling, and be damn’d”: Editing Aphra Behn’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, pp. 304–19, on p. 314. 32 M. Butler, ‘Editing Women’, p. 280. 33 R. J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). There is also considerable emphasis on anonymous editing in Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism. 34 Butler, ‘Editing Women’, p. 276.

2 An ambitious and quixotic series The ever-shifting role of the editor and the Chawton House Library Series Lorna J. Clark The occasion of marking the significant anniversary of the Chawton House Library (which passed its ten-year anniversary in 2013) and for recognizing the Chawton House Library Series (the first volume of which was published in 2007) seemed a good time to pause and reflect on the contributions made by both and their implications for textual scholarship and women’s literary history. My own contribution to the Women’s Novels strand of the series was an edition of The Romance of Private Life (1839) by Sarah Harriet Burney, the first modern edition of her work, published in 2008. The experience of editing it and partaking in the ongoing project of recovery of little-known women’s texts leads me to some reflections on the role of scholarly editions in a digital age. The era in which the novels in the series were first published (the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) was an explosive era for women writers, many of whom were engaged in the new profession of writing novels but also experimented with other genres. The dramatic expansion of print culture featured women as producers and consumers of the novel as a new commodity, as authorship became ‘an attractive option to women barred from most other means of employment’.1 The prevalence of women engaged in ‘bookish pursuits’2 and the astonishing range of publications produced by women in the literary marketplace have engaged many scholars and critics in ever-increasing numbers since the 1970s and 1980s. The launch of the Chawton House Library Series was what I have called (in my title) an ambitious and quixotic undertaking. The research library and study centre, whose aim is to ‘promote and facilitate study in the field of early women’s writing’, 3 partnered with a publisher, Pickering & Chatto, to make available some of the rare texts in its holdings in new scholarly editions, of which there were four strands: Women’s Memoirs, Women’s Travel Writings, Women’s Novels and Scholarly Editing. Under Pickering & Chatto, this series faced a very different situation from that which greeted earlier ones such as Pandora or Virago, and it differed partly by virtue of those earlier initiatives, which have helped to create a more receptive climate. There is now institutional support for

An ambitious and quixotic series  19 the study of early women’s writing, interested students, and individual scholars whose groundbreaking work has prepared the way for others. The quantity of work in the field has grown exponentially so that a context and an audience has been created for these writers which would have been unthinkable twenty or thirty years ago. The work of recovery has changed in nature over the years. In previous decades, the underlying problem was the dearth of texts and a basic lack of knowledge of the works of early women writers, whereas now much of that groundwork has been done. Then, even finding and reading the works was a challenge; locked up in rare book rooms (with strict opening hours), they had to be read by fits and starts, and relinquished at closing time, no matter what point of the story had been reached – which created a unique reading experience to say the least (reminiscent of the youth in Charles Lamb’s Elia essay who consumes Clarissa in ‘daily fragments’ at a bookseller’s stall).4 Now, with the advent of ECCO, Google Books, the Internet Archive and other resources, access to these once-­ inaccessible works is no longer a difficulty – and with an iPad, e-Reader or Kindle, they can simply be downloaded and read even at airports or on trains (an industry standard that was once used to separate the popular from the more scholarly works and which now no longer exists). The same is true of the ever-increasing number of manuscripts that are being scanned and made available online, which has revolutionized the way we do our research; even archives to which access was once severely restricted, such as the Royal Archives, are now opening their riches to the world. There are e-books which offer an alternative way of reading; there are Digital Scholarly Editions which surround the text with apparatus, and offer accompanying blogs to create a dialogue between readers. There are projects like 18thconnect.org, in which a reader may key in a text to create a publishable electronic edition. These developments and their impact have been explored recently in an MLA White Paper which asks at the outset a ‘fundamental question: What is the point of scholarly editions […] in an era of mass data?’ and finds a preliminary answer in ‘the creation of […] a single perspective on a much-larger-scale text archive.’5 With all of these technological developments changing the very nature of the way we read, where do we position a resource like the Chawton House Library Series? When early editions and out-of-copyright books can be accessed or downloaded, and reprints easily purchased from a print-on-demand publisher, is there any need today for a full-blown scholarly edition? What value or justification can we find for such an expenditure of expense and effort? Do we really need an editor to mediate between the reader and the text (since ‘all editions are mediations of some kind’)6 and, if so, what role does s/he play in the reading process? There are several aspects to the question of the value of scholarly publishing in the face of the wealth of material available on the web – or

20  Lorna J. Clark rather, especially in view of the overwhelming quantity of material available on the web. Our awareness of the extent of women’s participation in the book trade, the ‘broad-based incursion of women’s material in the literature market’,7 has changed dramatically in recent years. In 1986, when Dale Spender published her pioneering Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, many of the writers’ names were unfamiliar. Our knowledge and awareness of their work, and of the number of women involved in the book trade, has increased exponentially. In a work of scholarship published twenty-five years later, Romantic Women Writers Reviewed (2011–2013), the editor Ann R. Hawkins estimates that between the years 1789 and 1824, no fewer than 448 women produced almost 1000 texts, which were noticed in 3700 reviews published in British periodicals.8 Her nine-volume edition covers just three years of the book trade in England, yet gathers together reviews of the works of approximately 300 women writers, featured in 1200 separate articles in 100 different journals.9 In the face of the overwhelming number of writers, many newly discovered, and often quite accessible, the problem has shifted from one of finding and identifying material, to that of trying to filter and select from amongst the materials already uncovered. The ready abundance of material leads to the danger of overload: ironically, where once we objected to the process of canonization as being too restrictive, now we face the opposite problem in the need to process and prioritize the large amount of material available. For practical reasons, the reader (both academic and general) essentially needs a guide through this greatly expanded canon to point towards those recently discovered women writers who merit more attention, and to provide some context on their lives, literary production and the marketplace as a whole. It is worth ­noting that, in recognition of this need, Hawkins and her co-­editor, Maura Ives, are producing The Routledge Research Companion to Romantic Women ­Writers precisely to ‘help scholars navigate this dramatically expanded market,’ and ‘to further contextualize women’s literary production, i­ncluding […] the economic and material conditions of women’s writing in this period’.10 It is in the same niche, fulfilling the purposes both of discovery and consolidation, that the Chawton House Library Series should be placed; not only does it present little-known texts but also places them in context so that they may be better understood. In purely practical terms, a pre-selection process takes place with a panel of series editors choosing the authors to be included and the scholars to edit them; further selection then occurs at the editorial level in deciding which work from the author’s opus is the most representative. This system has worked well for the Women’s Novels strand which gives full-blown scholarly treatment to what the publisher described as the rare and important novels that are selected from the library’s holdings, with value added by including a substantial introduction, headnotes and endnotes in each volume.

An ambitious and quixotic series  21 A companion or ‘guide’ is a useful term to use here, recalling the quotation that appeared on the title page of each volume in the Everyman Library: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.’ The editor of a scholarly edition ideally plays this role of mentor or guide with knowledge born of many decades of study and familiarity with the period, leading the reader through uncharted territory, pointing out the highlights, explaining the context and relating the work to broader trends of the author or the era. In practical terms, as Barbara Bordalejo has recently argued, the principles of scholarly editing remain the same, regardless of whether the edition appears in print or digital form.11 To illustrate by way of example, I shall turn to my own volume, The Romance of Private Life by Sarah Harriet Burney, and consider what benefit its inclusion in the series provides for the reader. If one were to encounter this work in a facsimile edition, say, rather than in my own recently edited one, would the reader’s experience of the work be any different? Or, to come at it the other way, how much value has been added to this novel by presenting it as a scholarly edition?12 Essentially, there are three key areas to which the editor contributes value: the text, which is carefully vetted to ensure accuracy; the annotation, which provides a gloss on contemporary words or allusions; and the introduction, which helps to situate the text amidst its cultural milieu. My work as editor began with the selection of the text. Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844) is one of those writers ripe for rediscovery. Her name commands instant recognition, as she is half-sister to Frances Burney, who has emerged into the mainstream from her former role as a marginal precursor to Jane Austen, and whose lustre sheds light on the rest of the family. Sarah Harriet Burney has lately begun to attract attention in scholarly circles as the subject of entries or articles in, for example, Eighteenth-Century Life, Gothic Studies, and OpCit;13 she is also beginning to appear in more popular journals, such as Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine.14 A campaign is underway to restore her memorial plaque in a Bath church. Her five works of fiction (published between 1796 and 1839) were successful in their day; her writing was reviewed by Mary Wollstonecraft and appreciated by Jane Austen (who mentions reading Burney’s first novel Clarentine for a third time).15 Her works were also preferred by some readers to those of Frances Burney. A scholarly edition of one of Sarah Harriet Burney’s novels would introduce her work to a wider audience and deepen our understanding of fiction in the early modern period. The fifty-year span of her literary career is one aspect that I try to bring out in my edition, which also includes a general outline of Burney’s life. Sarah Harriet Burney began writing novels in the late eighteenth century, and kept writing through the Romantic era and into the early Victorian period. She can be seen as a pivotal figure, whose work

22  Lorna J. Clark bridges the two centuries. Reading her fiction, it has been suggested, will ‘help scholars apprehend better the strange, under-studied interval in the history of fiction that falls between Jane Austen’s death and Charles Dickens’s debut.’16 It is remarkable how similar are the themes, patterns and structures which recur in her writings; influenced by current literary trends and drawing on her own experience and observations, Burney created an interesting body of fiction which brings gender and family issues to the fore. It was a difficult task to choose just one of her works as each carries its own appeal. Her first two novels are similar to those of Austen in their lively dialogue, comic characters and use of irony or satire. Clarentine (1796), a domestic novel of manners, features a sailor-hero and raises intriguing overtones of incest, possibly linked to Burney’s own life. The epistolary Geraldine Fauconberg (1808) focuses on a family of country gentry in which young lovers delay their destined union through a series of misunderstandings, resolved by a Welsh recluse in a Gothic mansion. The ambitious best-selling novel, Traits of Nature (1812), takes five volumes to reach a happy resolution for a pair of star-crossed lovers, and presents a satiric view of fashionable society. The vivid re-enactment of an elopement and subsequent paternal rejection reverberate throughout the novel, bringing to mind the tension in Burney’s relationship with her father and her own abscondence from home, and making this her most autobiographical work. Burney experiments with a new genre in her next two titles, each of which is comprised of two tales. The first tale in Tales of Fancy, The Shipwreck (1816), evokes Shakespeare in its portrayal of a group of castaways marooned on a tropical island; the second, Country Neighbours (1820), takes as its purview the ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ recommended by Austen.17 The narrator is a forty-year-old spinster who comments ironically on her own family circle. The last title, The Romance of Private Life (1839), also features two tales, and it was this work that I chose for the Chawton House Library series. I chose it for its literary qualities; I think it is her best writing, based on a lifetime of experience (it was published when the author was nearing seventy). It was a good place to start for the first-ever reissue of a Burney novel because it gathers up so many of the motifs of her earlier fiction and brings them to fruition, so it provides a useful way in. Even the title, The Romance of Private Life, is indicative, as all of her fiction deals with private life in that she explores the domestic circle and its function ‘either as sanctuary or site of oppression’.18 Typically, although written on the pattern of a courtship novel with the central action culminating in a marriage, the love interest is never as compelling as the heroine’s quest for economic survival. In the first tale, The Renunciation, the strong-minded heroine travels through post-­Napoleonic Europe in a quest for identity, but unlike the Wanderer (the heroine of Frances Burney’s novel of 1814), manages to support herself in a profession.

An ambitious and quixotic series  23 Although all of Sarah Harriet Burney’s works tend to focus on heroines who reflect something of her own strong-willed and rebellious character, this could well be considered her most feminist text. In the ‘Note on the Text’ in the Chawton edition, background information is given which illuminates Burney’s choice of genre. It was her publisher, the commercially minded Henry Colburn (with his keen sense of the market) who recommended that Burney try the popular genre of tale. An outline is also given of the financial arrangements between them, which indicated his faith in her commercial viability.19 Besides providing the publication history of the work and an account of contemporary reviews, some of the research presented helps to define the genre. The second and last tale Burney published, The Hermitage, represents a new departure for her own fiction, and had portentous consequences for the development of the novel. The tale seems to change direction part way through; it starts out as a conventional novel of manners into which a shocking murder suddenly intrudes itself somewhat incongruously. Based on textual analysis and documentary evidence, I suggest that it was written in stages: Burney worked on it, then set it aside for a number of years, and then returned to it to ‘new model’ and ‘materially improve it’;20 she had aged and the literary culture had changed. Instead of Austen, she was reading the early works of Dickens. This might explain why the tale has two separate halves. The staggered time of writing accounts for the disparity of literary influences, as the tale appears to straddle two centuries; set in the atmosphere of an earlier Gothic era, it points forward to the Victorian novels of Dickens or Wilkie Collins – with its use of Freudian doubles, exotic imagery and folkloric motifs. Presenting this background to Burney’s work helps to highlight its innovative nature and historical significance; it is not only (as I have argued) the first murder mystery written by a woman but it also predates all other contenders for the honour of ‘first’ crime story written in English – such as Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), many of whose features it anticipates by almost thirty years, and even Poe’s first detective story by at least two years. Moreover, it links the female Gothic and domestic novels of the 1790s to the murder mystery of the Victorians, thus challenging assumptions about the patriarchal origin of the genre and placing it firmly in the female tradition of the novel. 21 An example of the way in which the spadework done by an editor can affect the reader’s understanding of a work is found on Wikipedia, in which more than one article points to the parallels between The Moonstone and the ‘earlier murder mystery story’ written by Sarah Harriet Burney, citing the introduction to this edition as the source. 22 Besides the introduction, a second area of contribution is the annotation, which identifies the allusions (literary, historical and personal) and highlights any unusual use of language. For this edition, much time was spent on the epigraphs, which are found at the head of each chapter,

24  Lorna J. Clark often without attribution. Tracking down the sources was an intriguing task, as Burney’s choices (some of which were unusual) can be taken to give some indication, not only of her own reading habits and preferences, but of those works which had some prevalence or influence on the period. More than half came from the plays of Shakespeare, which was hardly surprising, given that he was easily Burney’s favourite author: she read, quoted and attended performances of his plays throughout her life and expresses her enthusiasm in several letters (‘Dear Shakespear!’). When recommending useful reading for a young woman, she urges her to ‘get Shakespeare by heart’. 23 Her father’s library, to which she had easy access for most of her life, contained no fewer than six editions of Shakespeare. 24 Burney’s fondness for the theatre is also indicated by repeated citations from the Renaissance tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. Poetry was less to her taste, judging by its rare appearance in the epigraphs and by the fact that the quotations she makes can often be traced to an intermediary source, Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems (1758)25 – which I only realized when working on the annotation – although there is one citation from a lesser-known poet, William Robert Spencer (1770–1834), who was an acquaintance of Burney. Finally, she appears to have enjoyed showing off her facility with languages by quoting from several French and Italian works in the original. A study of Burney’s chapter epigraphs could be used to yield data for a study of the reading habits of women in the metropolis. 26 At their best, Burney’s epigraphs (like those of George Eliot) have an ‘organic function’ in her fiction, 27 offering a sort of parallel or ironic text to be read in counterpoint to the novel. Towards the end, though, the relevance of the epigraphs seems to trail off and she appears to have run out of material, which might explain a mysterious tragicomedy mined as a source for the last three epigraphs. The play could not be found, which seemed rather curious, especially since the quotations (though lacking in poetic merit) were particularly well adapted to the themes of the chapters. After a long fruitless search for a source, I came to the conclusion that Burney probably wrote the lines herself, creating a fictitious title, ‘Not So Old As It Seems’ as a kind of literary joke. Aside from the sources and their function, Burney’s method of finding them is of interest. A revealing exchange takes place in correspondence with her half-sister Frances Burney, who gave her well-meaning advice on how to find appropriate texts. ‘If you have not heard of or tried the plan I will tell you a short cut to getting mottos – Beg – Borrow – or the other thing Dr Johnsons Dictionary –’, 28 to which Sarah Harriet Burney responded: ‘dear Johnny – His Dictionary, –Shakespear’s Plays – & my own old common-Place books, give me the fairest chance of hitting upon apropos bits’. 29 Her commonplace books have not survived, but the reference to Johnson’s Dictionary points to a fruitful line of enquiry,

An ambitious and quixotic series  25 another layer of the text that needs exploring, that might contribute, for example, to a study of the influence of Johnson’s work in the period. Besides the cultural context, there is a personal and familial context that I tried to bring out, both in the introduction and notes. In the first tale in the volume, The Renunciation, the heroine Agnes sets out courageously to travel solo across the face of Europe in quest of a family and a sense of identity. The journey is a challenging feat for her to accomplish even in fiction, but its significance is enhanced by the knowledge that Burney had done so herself in 1829 and, like her heroine, had faced criticism for her unconventional behaviour: travelling alone by public coach from London to Lausanne was considered a flagrant disregard of lady-like decorum.30 There are also intertextual references: Sarah Harriet Burney’s work of 1839 invites comparison to The Wanderer (1814) of an earlier generation. Not only was the literary career of the younger Burney carried on in the shadows of the elder, but her own heroine sets out to prove that the independence sought, attempted, but ultimately renounced in the earlier novel, is achievable; the younger Burney’s heroine finds no difficulty in supporting herself. Finally, there are scenes illuminated by passages in her private writings; for instance, a scene singled out for praise by Isobel Grundy as recreating vividly the homesickness of a child31 draws resonance from one of Burney’s own childhood experiences. The motifs of travel, dislocation and loss are all elements which recur in Burney’s fiction and which (like a kaleidoscope) can be seen refracted in her letters. In a remarkable scene in The Renunciation, she depicts vividly the moment of shock when a father discovers he has been abandoned by his daughter. This scene recurs in Burney’s fiction and appears to haunt her imagination, an obsession which can be illuminated by recourse to family letters in which a similar scene is described as unfolding in response to her own flight, as a young woman, from the family home to set up house with her married halfbrother. In this (her last novel), she gives a most powerful rendition of the emotional havoc wreaked on a family by a single act. Writing footnotes is not a transparent medium, however, and an editor must be aware that even the very presence of notes impinges on the reader’s experience of the text, shaping or determining it in various ways. For, although footnotes are ‘inherently marginal’ (as Shari Benstock writes), they ‘are innately referential as well, reflecting on the text, engaged in dialogue with it, and often performing an interpretive and critical act on it’. As a stand-in for the reader, explaining what may be obscure to him/her in the text, the notes ‘negotiate the middle ground between this author and other authors, between this author and the reader’.32 However seemingly objective and neutral an editor attempts to be, any intervention imposes a kind of authority, and adds another voice that calls attention to itself. Theoretically, it has been argued that the position of editor asserts a ‘degree of phallocentric authority’ as ‘the

26  Lorna J. Clark Subject Presumed to Know.’33 Especially when notes are placed at the bottom of the page, the separator line which creeps up the page for heavily annotated passages can be a visual reminder of the tussle for authority taking place between author and editor. In this edition, however, the notes have been collected together at the end, separating the commentary physically from the text, which somewhat reduces the power of the editor to interrupt the reader’s experience. A work which was published in several editions, each of which may have originated in a different time period or been geared towards a different audience, would arguably have become a different work each time, but this is not the case for the novels in the Chawton House Library Series, most of which have not been reprinted since they first appeared. Despite the drawbacks then (and the fear of falling into the editorial fallacy), the historical, literary and personal context brought to bear by the scholarly editor on these little-known texts adds a layering effect that is invaluable to the reader who is encountering these texts for the first time. So, as the first-ever scholarly edition of a Sarah Harriet Burney novel makes its way like a nervous debutante onto the stage of the world, there is all the excitement of breaking new ground and contributing to the project of reclaiming non-canonical texts by early women writers. The arrival of the Chawton House Library Series on the literary scene represents a milestone; the series provides a rich resource for understanding the development of the novel, the professionalization of early women writers, and the roots of modern feminism. For although much of the work of recovery has been accomplished, there is still more to be done; despite the electronic revolution, there will always be a place for the scholarly edition, for as long as there are readers, they will need editors along on the journey – to serve as their guide and friend.

Notes 1 J. Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 20. 2 N. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 2. 3 See www.chawtonhouse.org (accessed 28 July 2016). 4 C. Lamb, ‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’, London Magazine 6 (July 1822), pp. 33–6; reprinted in The Last Essays of Elia (London: Edward Moxon, 1833), pp. 195–200. 5 ‘Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions’ (2 September 2015), at https://scholarlyeditions.commons.mla.org/2015/09/02/ cse-white-paper/ (accessed 18 April 2016). 6 ‘Considering the Scholarly Edition’. 7 C. Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 115.

An ambitious and quixotic series  27 8 A. R. Hawkins, Introduction, in A. R. Hawkins (ed.), Romantic Women Writers Reviewed, 9 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011–13), vol. 1 (2011), pp. 15–16. 9 As highlighted in Pickering & Chatto’s publicity material for Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. 10 A. R. Hawkins, Justification for The Routledge Research Companion to Romantic Women Writers, ed. A. R. Hawkins and M. Ives (forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr Hawkins for allowing me to quote from her proposal. 11 B. Bordalejo, ‘Scholarly Editing and Digital Scholarly Editing’, a paper delivered at the Textual Ecologies Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship, Ottawa 14–16 April 2016. 12 A good working definition of ‘scholarly edition’ is provided in the MLA White Paper: ‘one that follows scholarly method and purpose, that is undertaken with professional critical judgment and the fullest possible understanding of the relevant primary materials, and that provides clear documentary evidence of the relations and contexts of those primary materials’. See ‘Considering the Scholarly Edition’. 13 L. J. Clark, ‘Recovery and Revisioning: The Literary Legacy of Sarah Harriet Burney’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 42:2 (forthcoming, April 2018); S. Russo, ‘Rewriting Radcliffe in the Age of Victoria: Sarah Harriet Burney’s The Romance of Private Life’, Gothic Studies, 19:1 (May 2017), pp. 73–90; C.  M. Fernàndez Rodriguez, ‘The Quest for Acceptance in Sarah Harriet Burney’s Works’, Op. Cit: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies, 12 (2013), pp. 1–15. 14 M. Lane, ‘Remembering the Burneys’, Regency World, 65 (March 2012), pp. 37–42. 15 In a letter dated 8 February 1807; see Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. D. Le Faye, 3rd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 120. 16 D. Lynch, Review: The Romance of Private Life, ed. L. J. Clark (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), University of Toronto Quarterly, 80:2 (Spring 2011), pp. 354–6, on p. 355. 17 Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 275. 18 L. J. Clark, Introduction, in The Romance of Private Life (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p. xvi. 19 Clark, Introduction, pp. xxxiii–xxxv. 2 0 In a letter dated 1 September 1831; see The Letters of Sarah Harriet ­B urney, ed. L. J. Clark (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 355. 21 The case is argued not only in my ‘Introduction’, pp. xxii–xxvii, but also in my article, ‘The Hermitage: Late Gothic or Early Detective Fiction?’, Lumen, 23 (2004), pp. 165–78. 22 The Wikipedia articles on Sarah Harriet Burney and on Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) both draw attention to the similarities between the two stories. 23 The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, pp. 387, 142. 24 A Catalogue of the Miscellaneous Library of the late Charles Burney.… Which will be sold by auction (London: Leigh and Sotheby, 1814), pp. 50–1. 25 R. Dodsley, A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes By Several Hands, 6 vols (London: Printed by J. Hughs for R. and J. Dodsley, 1758). 26 For a comparable study of reading habits of provincial readers, see Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: ­Oxford University Press, 2006). 27 D. L. Higdon, ‘George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph’, Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction, 25:2 (September 1970), pp. 127–51, on p. 134.

28  Lorna J. Clark 28 The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. J. Hemlow and others, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84), vol. 12 (1984), ed. J. Hemlow, p. 962. 29 Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. Clark, p. 426. 30 H. C. Robinson sent a description of the mode of travel adopted by Burney to a female friend with a revealing disclaimer, not that it will be of any use whatever as a guide to you because it does little more than shew you how cheaply persons may travel whose circumstances and position in society require & enable them to travel as Miss Burney did. (H. C. Robinson to Miss Fenwicke, 6 March 1843, Dr Williams’s Library, cited in Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, p. 470, n. 1). 31 I. Grundy, ‘Sarah Harriet Burney’, in V. Blain, P. Clements and I. Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 160. 32 S. Benstock, ‘At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text’, PMLA, 98:2 (March 1983), pp. 204–5, on p. 204. 33 For a clear exposition of the application of Lacanian theory to the practice of editing, see C. J. Delery, ‘The Subject Presumed to Know: Implied Authority and Editorial Apparatus’, TEXT, 5 (1991), pp. 63–80.

3 Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746) Making (and unmaking) a periodical ‘for women’ Kathryn R. King The seriousness of a work has traditionally been a register of its suitability for critical editing. Conversely, critical editions confer seriousness. —Alexander Pettit1

There can be few more persuasive examples of the power of a critical edition to confer seriousness than the two-volume The Female Spectator (1744–1746) published as part of the six-volume Pickering & Chatto Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (2001–2002). Its release marked the first time since the eighteenth century that Haywood’s periodical appeared in its entirety in print – some 960 pages, carefully edited, introduced and annotated – and its appearance was impressive. The handsomely produced volumes came dressed in red cloth binding with a facsimile gilt-edged and gilt-lettered black label on the spine. The packaging said: serious. So did the opening sentence of the general introduction: ‘This is the first multi-volume edition of works by Eliza Haywood to appear in print since 1742; it is the first edition ever to apply rigorous principles of textual editing to a substantial and diverse body of Haywood’s material’. 2 The academic reviews were rhapsodic. The edition as a whole was hailed as splendid, magnificent; a bold enterprise that raised the bar for the scholarly presentation of works of once disparaged women authors. The Female Spectator was welcomed for putting into scholars’ hands a historically important periodical previously available only on microfilm (the vast resources of Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online would go online in 2004) or in highly selective print abridgements. The fullest of these, the selections prepared by Patricia Meyer Spacks for the Women Writers in English, 1350–1850 series, included by its editor’s estimate only about a third of the whole, a less than representative third as it turns out.3 Most pertinently for our purposes here, the edition exposed to scholarly view an unexpectedly wide swathe of periodical writing, including, in addition to the twenty-four ‘books’ of Female Spectator, the nine issues of the short-lived Jacobite weekly The

30  Kathryn R. King Parrot (1746), the partly serialized and subtly feminist-patriotic Epistles for the Ladies (1748–1750) and Haywood’s valedictory venture, The Young Lady (1756), a weekly essay paper narrated by one of the characters introduced in Female Spectator. The scope and extent of Haywood’s involvement in journalistic ventures at mid-century came as a revelation, and the present high visibility of Haywood’s periodicals, Female Spectator in particular, is surely one happy by-product of the texts chosen for Selected Works. Although I was one of the co-editors of Female Spectator, I can sing the praises of the Pickering & Chatto Selected Works without imputations of vanity because my contribution to the project as a whole, while significant, was almost adventitious in origin. When I came on board the truly consequential decisions had already been made by the general and textual editor, Alexander Pettit, and to him all credit is due. He set in motion an undertaking that one might not have expected to generate ‘the enthusiastic support of a major press’.4 He selected the rather daring range of texts and formulated the editorial principles. He recruited, organized and whiplashed into action an editorial team that worked across many time zones and national boundaries to complete a massive project in astonishingly little time, and he had the shrewdness as well as good fortune to secure as bibliographical consultant Patrick Spedding, then deep into the epoch-making A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004) in Melbourne, Australia. As co-editor of Female Spectator, Pettit worked in north Texas to establish a reliable emended text, with all the headache that entails; to me, in central Alabama, fell responsibility for key stroking the text and creating the explanatory apparatus, about which tasks more shortly. It was an ongoing joke that the sun never set on the Haywood Editorial Empire. The discussion that follows considers some of the ways the critical edition of Female Spectator has reshaped the field of Haywood studies and thinks about what these transformations might imply about future directions in editing work by women, in particular other ­female-authored periodicals in the eighteenth century. It begins with an overview of the making of the Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator and then reflects on how the attention to minute detail required by the editing process served to unmake (in my mind anyway) the received ideas about the periodical that I brought to the project. The discussion then turns to the remarkable remaking of Female Spectator that has occurred over the past decade or so in the work of a new generation of critics and scholars. The stimulus provided by the availability of a critical edition, nourished by insights gleaned from the ‘ripening’ field of eighteenth-century periodical studies, 5 has given rise to the sophisticated approaches to issues of gender, genre and periodical authorship that characterize much of the best recent work on Female Spectator, and these in turn have deepened appreciation of Haywood’s periodical

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  31 in ways I could not have imagined when I joined Team Haywood at the turn of the century. The scholarly remaking of Female Spectator amounts to a compelling argument for critical editions of understudied works from the edges.

The making of the Female Spectator The idea for a multi-volume critical edition of miscellaneous works by Haywood originated in December 1998 ‘to the surprise of its future editor’ when it ‘surfaced’ during a meeting at the Bloomsbury offices of the Pickering & Chatto publishing firm.6 The temporally relaxed approach to scholarly editing favoured by most academics is not shared by Pettit. He professes to prefer deadline-driven editorial projects and so was drawn from the outset to the challenge of meeting the ‘twin demands of haste and accuracy’. He liked the commercial firm’s ‘emphasis on prompt production: their capitalist mandate was congruent with my feminist-pragmatist sense of the urgency of the enterprise at hand’.7 Pickering & Chatto, for their part, wanted to ‘stake’ their ‘claim to Haywood’, who was attracting a high level of editorial interest at this time;8 indeed, no other British author of the period generated ‘this much editorial activity in the final decades of the twentieth century’.9 To adopt Pettit’s phrase, it was the ‘mandate of the moment’ to get Haywood out there and get her out there quickly, but in meticulously edited texts – sound editing ‘confers ethos, retrospectively’ is something of a mantra for him – and all the better if in the finish the capacious edition revealed the unsuspected generic and topical diversity of Haywood’s writings.10 (She was known at the time as a racy amatory novelist, a far cry from the journalist of considerable range on view in Selected Works.) In an unusually frank acknowledgement of the element of opportunism lurking amongst the idealistic motivations for the undertaking, he explained that he preferred the ‘short-leash’ of commerce to the more leisurely proceedings of a university press in part because the latter ‘seemed unlikely to move the project along with sufficient celerity to accommodate the rather sudden boom in Haywood studies’.11 Thus commenced the project that would claim the next two years of my life. On sabbatical in Cape Town, exhausted by completion of a major project, I was reading in desultory fashion under the bluest sky imaginable when I received an email early in 1999 inviting me to co-edit Female Spectator. Alex Pettit was an old friend, and we had worked well together on an earlier project. The actual work would not begin until my sabbatical was over, and such were my powers of denial that even the ‘short-leash’ submission date seemed too far off to dim the dazzle of an endlessly blue sky. The email advanced several compelling reasons why I should join the project, none of which I can remember, but I vividly recall the phrase that got me in the end: ‘besides … it is The Female

32  Kathryn R. King Spectator!’ The Addisonian-styled periodical was one of Haywood’s most familiar titles and, unlike the vast majority of works in the voluminous but then crepuscular oeuvre, it had never quite disappeared from view. The eighteenth-century critic Clara Reeve had singled it out in The Progress of Romance (1785) as one of two works by which Haywood would be known by posterity (the other being the late-career secret history The Invisible Spy (1755)), and it had gone through several abridged editions in the twentieth century, the earliest of which had dubbed the author ‘an Addison in petticoats’. In the second half of the century the Female Spectator began to attract more respectful scholarly attention, and this interest accelerated rapidly as the feminist recovery project gained momentum.12 By the time the Pickering & Chatto edition was conceived, Female Spectator carried special historical cachet as what everyone agreed was the first periodical written by a woman for women readers. Co-edit The Female Spectator? Sure, why not? As textual editor, Pettit bore the onus of decision-making on everything from choice and emendation of copy-text, to line-end hyphenation and the apparatus for its display, to formatting and typographical styling (to speed the tempo, he had agreed to prepare camera-ready copy), and, because he prided himself on informed judiciousness in these matters, he put himself through a serious round of study of editorial theory and practice, the fruits of which are on display in two essays on the editing of Female Spectator.13 My role was more humble. I would provide introductory materials and annotations; I would keystroke the text. (Keystroke: ‘A stroke of a key, as on a computer keyboard’.) The annotations were to be light, ‘selective’. The edition was designed for the use of eighteenth-century specialists presumed capable of identifying on their own references that would have required annotation for classroom use. Garden-variety mythological, classical and historical references would not be annotated; neither, more controversially, would words that could be looked up in the Oxford English Dictionary unless they were very peculiar indeed. (In retrospect, I wish I had broken with edict to call attention to the period sense of promiscuous in the Female Spectator’s reference to the ‘Hurry of promiscuous Diversions’ that had marked her earlier years. It might have blunted the impulse, still alive, to attach anachronistic sexualized meanings to the oft-cited passage.)14 Snatches of poetry – and there were many, upwards of 160 – were to be identified, however, and, while a challenge, the task was less daunting than first appeared due to newly available digital resources.15 ECCO was still in the future, but the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online databases (English Poetry, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and English Drama) went a long way toward tracking down sources of quoted passages. Interestingly, they demonstrated that Haywood was something of a mash-up artist in her use of found materials, mixing and matching her sources in ­creative ways. I speculated that Haywood may have had before her

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  33 eyes an actual source, and subsequent scholarship has confirmed the guess and traced the source. It turns out that Haywood made lavish use of Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry, an oft-reprinted (and oft-plundered) collection of poetic extracts that she seemed to have used as something of a personal commonplace book, possibly throughout her career.16 This is one of many post-publication revelations that have changed the way scholars look at the working methods and purposes of the author of Female Spectator. It will be recalled that part of my job was to ‘keystroke’ the text. While lazing under African skies I little considered that ‘keystroking’ meant that I would type, proofread and proofread again a source text that would spread over two hefty volumes. To help with proofreading I was able, with university support, to hire a team of underpaid graduate students and English majors to read the entire text out loud to one another, word for word and character for character. It was then subjected to the same painstaking process at the University of North Texas, Pettit’s institution. The ‘keystroking’ might have been farmed out, of course, but that would have been costly (financial support was limited) and besides, I reasoned, typing every word would familiarize me with a text I knew only in the pre-digested bits served up by editors before me. Confronting the contents in full, word for word and character for character, did in fact prove valuable, and the mindless tedium I had anticipated had the unexpected effect of inducing a curiously receptive kind of mindfulness. With no thesis to occupy my critical intelligence, or theoretical model to act as a filter, my mind was free to mull over passages and even entire numbers that an abridging editor guided by the prevailing ‘byfor-and-about-women’ paradigm might have skimmed or passed over altogether. Moreover, I was aware that annotation was just around the bend and was therefore attuned to potential points of contact with the world outside the text – a world that included courtship and marriage to be sure, but also cultural debates, religious cross-currents and political public-sphere events omitted from earlier editions and often ignored by students of the periodical.

The unmaking of the Female Spectator The annotation process changed forever the way I read Haywood. Tracking down references to John Locke, Thomas Baker, Samuel Clarke, Andrew Baxter, Robert Burton, Suetonius (and I could go on) brought home the extent to which the periodical, in its bounding Enlightenment curiosity, involved itself in philosophy, politics, history, science, travel, theology and much more. Researching contemporary contexts for the Female Spectator’s blistering attack on Maria Theresa’s role in the European war over the Austrian succession, or reconstructing the political circumstances that made sense of a seemingly out-of-nowhere paean to

34  Kathryn R. King the Broad Bottom coalition published in January 1745, raised doubts, to say the least, about the received notion that Haywood’s periodical ‘eschews public politics as subject’; that its ‘attention is strictly devoted to women’s affairs’.17 In light of my research into the work’s political contexts the carefully gendered pronouns, as in the second sentence of the first number – ‘the Reader, on casting his Eye over the four or five first Pages, may judge how far the Book may, or may not be qualified to entertain him, and either accept, or throw it aside as he thinks proper’ (emphasis mine) – gave new complexion to the Female Spectator’s declared intent to be as ‘universally read as possible’.18 The process of keystroking and annotation troubled a whole set of ideas about Female Spectator, in other words, and it no longer seemed adequate to frame the periodical as a reluctant withdrawal into the domestic sphere or, more attractively, as the creation for women readers of the ‘intimacy and female community’ of a feminine counter-world.19 The orthodox view that Female Spectator stands as ‘the first periodical designed solely for female patronage’ obviously needed to be rethought. 20 Another casualty of the process was the wishful thought that minute attention to particulars of the content would yield up moments of contact with Haywood ‘herself’, the historical woman discoverable somewhere within the vibrant miscellaneity of the text. Haywood is so elusive, biographically speaking, that her admirers yearn for a glimpse of the real woman. The Female Spectator eidolon, a liberally educated woman-about-town who does not hesitate to declare herself ‘Mouth’ of the editorial club she assembles, seems to promise just such contact. Indeed, one of my editorial predecessors refers readers to the eidolon’s self-introduction in the opening paragraphs of Female Spectator for ‘further clues’ to Haywood’s ‘early life’. 21 During the long summer of keystroking I was on heightened alert for clues about the personal history – direct or encoded references to places, people, memories, that would throw light on Haywood’s past. Researching the annotations, I spent more time than I care to remember pursuing biographical leads that failed to pan out, a tantalizingly specific reference to a manuscript she read on loan from Robert Harley, the first earl of Oxford, to take just one example. Again and again I was hauled back to the realization that I was editing a periodical, not a memoir. In my preface I explained that I was at pains to distinguish persona from author and vented some impatience with critics who ‘have little trouble distinguishing Mr Spectator, let us say, from either Addison or Steele’ but seemed unwilling to extend similar consideration to Haywood. 22 Ionia Italia has since made a similar point, possibly more strongly: ‘Of course, since the Female Spectator was published anonymously, the reader is not made acquainted with “an Author”, but with a fictitious persona’. 23 But the desire to know more about Haywood can be fierce, and it seems likely that some readers will continue to interpret

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  35 the persona’s account of herself in the opening number – a bell-wether of the genre, by the way – as a rehearsal of Haywood’s own earlier gallantries, never mind that such a reading confuses periodical convention with self-disclosure. I also began to question the assumption that most, or all, of the correspondence came from Haywood’s hand. I was hardly the first to notice that many of the letters purported to come from male correspondents and that they were datelined from unmistakeably masculine spaces such as coffee houses. Scholars tended to treat these letters as authorial voicings: ‘Haywood probably wrote all, or virtually all, of these essays, although many allegedly originate in letters from readers’. 24 Fictive correspondence enabled her to ‘experiment with male personae’, including the microscope-toting Philo-Naturae and tea-aversive John Careful, to which pairing I would want to add the fatuous Curioso-Politico, writer of a misogynistic letter too satirically useful not to have been written by Haywood. 25 But the more I worked with the correspondence, the less it seemed inevitable that Haywood was the sole author. Some letters read as if commissioned, and it seemed unwise to rule out the possibility that others were bona fide reader contributions à la period practice. Beginning in the 1690s, when John Dunton solicited contributions for his Athenian Mercury (1691–1697) – the platform on which a teenage Elizabeth Singer (later Mrs Rowe) staged her own print-world debut – periodical editors came increasingly to rely upon ‘the anonymous unpaid contributions of their readers’. 26 The eidolons they create to perform the role of periodical author pride themselves on attracting correspondents and cultivating a give-and-take relationship with eager readers. Why, I began to wonder, should Haywood be regarded as different from her contemporaries in this regard? Subsequent work by Italia, Manushag Powell and others in the surging field of periodical studies has demonstrated the powerful role of generic convention in shaping the eighteenth-century periodical authored by women and men alike.27 Much of what had seemed peculiarly ‘Haywoodian’ about the Female Spectator turns out to be mediated by the codes and conventions of the genre. Viewed in this generic context, Haywood herself emerges as a periodicalist whose textual femaleness is a resource to be drawn upon by an author adept at crossing lines of gender and genre. As Powell puts it, this is a Haywood who showed other writers how a ‘clever feminine voice’ could ‘negotiate social boundaries and hold forth publicly even while the female body was supposed to be more domestically confined’. 28 Critics have long honoured the generic range of materials within the Female Spectator. There is now growing recognition of the periodical-essay itself as a self-conscious literary genre possessed of its own rhetoric, tropes, themes and codes and with it a deepening appreciation of Haywood’s inventiveness in appropriating these conventions for her purposes.

36  Kathryn R. King

Nearly four pounds of ephemera revisited The material solidity of the Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator, the very heft of its two hard-cover volumes – together they weigh in at ‘3 lbs., 10 oz. (640 gm.)’, Pettit wryly notes – proclaim that Haywood matters, and I am proud to have been part of the editorial team that helped confer seriousness upon a work that subsequent criticism has shown to deserve the labour that went into its making. 29 It is one measure of the transformations partly effected by the edition that Pettit’s own reflections on the ‘ephemerality’ of the original issue of Female Spectator now seem out of date. I want to revisit the provocative and, I now think, illgrounded argument he advanced in 2006 in ‘The Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator: Nearly Four Pounds of Ephemera, Enshrined’ that the edition misrepresents Haywood’s supposedly purely commercial intentions. The Female Spectator was not meant to ‘outlive its own time’; it was issued ‘without regard for posterity and other literary historical affectations’. The ‘designedly durable’ Pickering & Chatto edition is therefore ‘artificial’ and ‘misrepresentative’. Its very solidity imparts a prestige and authority that the periodical did not possess in its own moment when its ‘native status as ephemera’ was taken for granted. 30 When I first read the essay I thrilled to its passionate advocacy of carefully edited texts of works by an expanding range of eighteenth-century women writers, and still do. But the argument that the high standards of the Pickering & Chatto edition represent some kind of betrayal of Haywood’s ‘professedly commercial’ intentions no longer makes sense to me.31 Pettit is careful to avoid the well-worn pejoratives (money-­grubbing, venal, mercenary and so on) by which an earlier generation dismissed Haywood as a hack; but his language explicitly, even aggressively, lands her back on Grub Street. Her intentions are ‘extratextual’, as he puts it; her purposes ‘commercial rather than formal or thematic’.32 Granted, Haywood was a professional who wrote for her livelihood but it does not follow that her attitude toward her materials was therefore ‘extratextual’, whatever that might mean, or that she was indifferent to form and theme – or other literary concerns, for that matter. A marketplace author inevitably confronts tensions between commercial and expressive purposes, but the desire to attract a paying audience does not necessarily cancel out the desire to write well, as the examples of Pope, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson and Goldsmith (amongst many others) amply demonstrate. It is anything but clear why merit and marketplace should be at odds in the case of the Female Spectator or why of all the periodicalists-for-pay operating at mid-century (Fielding and Johnson spring to mind) Haywood should be singled out as driven by ‘extratextual’ concerns. Italia’s perceptions in her important The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century (2005) usefully complicate the picture drawn by Pettit. Her chapter on Female Spectator argues for recognition of the

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  37 genteel literary aims that underwrite Haywood’s construction of an image of polite amateur female authorship within the periodical and shape her elevating representation of format and readership. (Monthly issues are designated ‘books’; purchasers are ‘subscribers’.) In Italia’s analysis Haywood aligns the periodical, not with the middling class of the Habermas model, much less the Grub Street locale implied by Pettit, but rather with a genteel readership – a ‘far more socially exclusive group’ variously defined as ‘polite, leisured, genteel, elegant, tasteful and “gay”’. The construction of the Female Spectator eidolon as a ‘genteel lady of leisure who does not write for profit’ is part of an effort to purify the monthly essays of their commercial taint. The ‘acute concern with social exclusivity’ brings to this particular periodical – and to the genre more broadly – a measure of social and cultural refinement heretofore lacking, and the appeal to a genteel female audience is part of a sophisticated literary strategy designed to enhance the fashionable status of Female Spectator.33 Pettit may be right that the sheets of the first unbound numbers were put to undignified uses (all those pie wrappers, curling papers and relics of the bum beloved of commentators) but it is crucial to recall, as recent studies have stressed, that successful periodicals were collected and reissued in bound volumes and in this way endowed with a newly dignified and (pace Pettit) durable life. Female Spectator was certainly meant to endure. Spedding concludes on the basis of signatures and tomaisons (volume numbers) that the publisher, Thomas Gardner, intended from the start that individual parts be bound in four volumes, and such was his confidence in the sustained marketability of the periodical that he took out copyright on each volume.34 In addition, at six shillings per volume, before binding, this was an expensive set – ‘significantly more, both absolutely and on a per-volume basis, than any other multivolume work by Haywood’. He concludes that there was ‘a strong and affluent market for the Female Spectator’.35 Powell points out that ‘interval publishing is only the first step in a periodical’s material lifespan’ in the eighteenth century; ‘the cultural memory of the most important periodicals’ – ­Female Spectator falls in this category – ‘was probably more attached to bound volumes and reprints than the form of the initial run’.36 Ironically, some of the best evidence for the durability of Female Spectator and the beyond-­the-moment reach of Haywood’s and her publisher’s intentions, is embodied in Pettit’s own editorial decisions. The copy-text he selected was the first collected and bound edition, the four-volume set of original issues. In 1745 the set was furnished with a number of prestige-conferring paratextual features, the most important being the familiar Remi Parr engraved frontispiece showing four genteel women engaged in thoughtful conversation around a table in a book-lined room graced with busts of the classical poet Sappho and French woman of letters Madame Dacier, touches suggestive of an inheritance of polite female education, literature and scholarship. This frontispiece is reproduced in the edition along with

38  Kathryn R. King an index and dedication to a noble woman entreating ‘Protection to the following Sheets’. These paratextual features testify to a high degree of literary aspiration, a claim on a long textual life that chimes with the pretensions to gentility sketched in by Italia and squashes Pettit’s contention that the periodical was not ‘designed to outlive its own time’. (In fact, as Spedding reports, by 1756, the year of Haywood’s death, Female Spectator ‘had gone through seven editions in English, one in German, two in French, and one in Italian’. The last collected edition appeared in 1775 in both London and Glasgow).37 In 1785, as already noted, Reeve named Female Spectator as one of the works by which Haywood would be known by posterity. Everything in the history of the bibliographic transmission and reception of the periodical indicates that Haywood and her publisher were consciously claiming a place in a highly respected female lineage and staking a claim to futurity. So the question becomes why Pettit, a smart critic who knows better, would emphasize so strenuously an ephemerality that was mostly his own invention. I cannot speak for him, of course, but I can speak to the question more generally by reflecting on why, when I first read his argument, I assented without serious reservations to a view of Haywood’s literary insufficiencies that now strikes me as deeply patronizing. I believe we both significantly underrated Haywood’s command of her periodical materials even as we were wholly committed to doing right by her text and fully appreciative of the energy and breadth of her interests. The very notion of the ‘ephemerality’ of Female Spectator is the product, I now believe, of what E. P. Thompson called the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ that in this case reflects (amongst other myopias) a failure to recognize the generic complexities of the periodical.38 My deepened respect for Female Spectator today is owing to work that came out after the publication of the Pickering & Chatto edition. I am thinking of monographs by Italia, Powell and Juliette Merritt, whose excellent Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (2004) finds much of its inspiration in the spectator trope, to say nothing of the eleven essays on Female Spectator commissioned by Donald Newman and Lynn Marie Wright for Fair Philosopher (2006), as well as additional journal articles. Even as I was keystroking Female Spectator and eagerly investigating its intricate connections to the public world, I was embarrassingly unschooled (I now know) in the generic codes and conventions of the eighteenth-century periodical. It took the work of those who used the edition to teach me the sophisticated achievements of the work I had edited.

The Female Spectator remade Female Spectator is a different work today than it was in 2001 when it presented itself to scholars within the handsome red cloth-bound covers of the Pickering & Chatto Selected Works. In a way, the edition

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  39 functioned as a kind of Call for Papers, a call to explore a work previously available in print only in pre-selected and inevitably skewed samples. Two collections of essays bracketing the edition’s publication illustrate the point. Shortly before publication there appeared, in 2000, the first-ever collection of essays on Haywood, The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (2000) edited by Kirsten Saxton and Rebecca Bocchicchio. Its index records a mere six references to Female Spectator, each a comment in passing, as it turns out. Most of the material focuses on the prose fictions, with an emphasis characteristic of its moment upon the amatory and scandal fictions and secret histories. In striking contrast, a special 2014 issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies comprising pieces commissioned for the purpose of exploring new approaches to Haywood gives prominent attention to the periodicals, Female Spectator of course, but also the ­almost-periodical Epistles for the Ladies and the strangely ­periodical-like Invisible Spy. Amatory fiction and secret history have not dropped out of the frame, and probably never will, but of the nine essays making up the special issue, two are devoted to Haywood’s late-­ career journalism, a third considers the late prose fiction Dalinda: or, The Double Marriage (1749) as an instance of tabloid journalism, and yet another considers in some detail the significance of the frontispiece to Female Spectator. Haywood’s periodicals are on the map in a way that seems almost inconceivable without the stimulus of the Pickering & Chatto edition and the critical work that appeared in its wake; and Female Spectator in particular is emerging as central to the Haywood canon – and beyond. The periodical is no longer ‘merely a curiosity as one of the first journals for women written by a woman’, Amy Wolf observed in 2009, but stands instead ‘at the center of a cultural matrix, addressing important larger questions’, a comment that points to a broader shift in women’s literary history, an increasingly robust confidence that female achievements belong within the cultural matrix as part of literary culture, not a feminine counter-culture. 39 Powell, in her invigorating ‘Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?)’, speculates that Female Spectator may be ‘poised to assume a central spot within Haywood’s canon, becoming an anchor that holds together the varied genres of her career and the full range of its dramatic, novelistic, poetic, and scandalous concoctions’.40 To the question implicit in her title, she provides an answer: ‘the time has come for periodicalists to think seriously of hanging out the sign of Eliza’.41 All of which goes to substantiate the idea that served as point of departure for this essay, a point upon which I agree wholeheartedly with Pettit, that soundly edited critical editions confer seriousness. The most obvious rationale for the existence of such editions is that they provide trustworthy access to texts, but more than that, as this essay has tried to show, they create an ethos that beckons scholars to invest the time

40  Kathryn R. King and energy required to think deeply, imaginatively and collectively about works from the edges that were once disregarded or even derided. Over the past several decades we have seen a spate of wholly welcome editions of eighteenth-century novels by women that have radically changed the way scholars of all ideological persuasions think about the story of the ‘rise of the novel’. We are only beginning to recognize how much there is to be learned from and about the periodicals written and edited by some of these same women novelists. Two standouts that deserve the full editorial treatment accorded Female Spectator are Frances Brooke’s sparkling weekly The Old Maid (1755–1756) and Charlotte Lennox’s innovative The Lady’s Museum (1760–1761), to name two of the most important mid-century female-edited periodicals.42 Men writing as women, Christopher Smart as Mary Midnight in The Midwife; or, the Old Woman’s Magazine (1750–1753) and Bonnell Thornton as Priscilla Termagant in The Spring-Garden Journal (1752), a work that includes three instalments of a parodic ‘The New Female Spectator’, should be better known. The energetic, sometimes hilarious, often topsy-turvy world of the eighteenth-century periodical is due for renewed investigation, and my bet is that such a reappraisal will prove as transformative as recent work on Haywood has.43 In the twentieth century the Haywood of Female Spectator went from being a petticoated oddity to a distinctively female singularity – the author of ‘the first periodical written by a woman for women’, as I put it a bit simplistically in my headnote. In much of the best recent work she is an author-editor engaged in exchange with a wide range of correspondents and collaborators, some made-up and others, almost certainly, real; an Enlightenment thinker of broad cultural range directing her thoughts, with supreme confidence, to a wide and educated audience; a periodical-essayist taking her place alongside others in a community of mid-century periodicalists that includes Brooke, Fielding, Goldsmith, Johnson, Lennox, James Ralph, Smart and Thornton; an essayist wondrously inventive at bending the generic conventions of the periodical to her own uses. She need no longer be held up as a freakish editor-in-drag or summed up by her status as one or another female ‘first’. So long as Female Spectator continues to matter, it will be unmade and remade in ways not imaginable today. It is my hope that before long the texts of Haywood’s sister and brother periodicalists-on-the-margins, respectfully edited, will begin to play much larger roles in the making of the field of periodical studies.

Notes 1 A. Pettit, ‘The Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator: Nearly Four Pounds of Ephemera, Enshrined’, in L. M. Wright and D. J. Newman (eds), Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and ‘The Female Spectator’ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 42–59, on p. 43.

Editing Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–1746)  41 2 A. Pettit, General Introduction, in A. Pettit (ed.), Selected Works of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000–2001), set I, vol. 1, p. ix, hereafter, Works followed by set and volume number. 3 P. M. Spacks, Introduction, in P. M. Spacks (ed.), Selections from ‘The ­Female Spectator’ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xxi. 4 Pettit, General Introduction, in Works, I, 1, p. ix. 5 The term ‘ripening’ is from M. N. Powell, ‘New Directions in Eighteenth-­ Century Periodical Studies’, Literature Compass, 8:5 (2011), pp. 240–57, on p. 240. Her suggestion that periodicals ‘can be fruitfully studied as a genre unto themselves’ (p. 241), has strongly influenced my rethinking of Female Spectator. 6 Pettit, Acknowledgements, in Works, I, 1, p. xix. 7 A. Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts, “Marginal” Works, and the Mandate of the Moment: The Case of Eliza Haywood’, TSWL, 22:2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 293–314, on p. 298. 8 Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts’, p. 298. 9 Pettit, General Introduction, in Works, I, 1, p. x. 10 Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts’, p. 298. 11 Ibid., pp. 299, 298. 12 For a detailed overview of its editorial and critical fortunes see D. J. Newman, ‘The Female Spectator: A Bibliographic Essay’, in D. J. Newman and L. M. Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 212–41. ‘Addison in petticoats’ comes from J. B. Priestley, Introduction, in M. Priestley (ed.), The Female Spectator: Being Selections from Mrs. Eliza Heywood’s Periodical (1744–1746) (London: John Lane, 1929), p. vii. 13 They are ‘Terrible Texts’ (see n. 7) and ‘The Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator’ (see n. 1). 14 Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, ed. K. R. King and A. Pettit, in Works, II, 2, pp. 17–18, hereafter FS. I. Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), notes that ‘promiscuous Diversions’ refers to ‘balls, routs, masquerades and other amusements fashionable with the leisured classes’ and may reflect ‘myriad and rapid transitions from one topic to another within the periodical itself’ (p. 125). 15 And highly competent assistance from Anna Patchias, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia. 16 I am grateful to Norbert Schürer for sharing his unpublished research on Haywood’s use of Bysshe in FS. Carol Stewart, in an email of 14 October 2013, reports similar findings regarding Life’s Progress through the Passions (1748) which she edited for Pickering & Chatto’s Chawton House Library Series; her splendid edition of Invisible Spy, also for the Chawton House Library Series, records Bysshe’s role as an unacknowledged resource: see Eliza Haywood, The Invisible Spy, ed. C. Stewart (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), p. 469, n. 4. 17 Spacks, Introduction, in Selections, p. xvii; to be fair, the same sentence affirms Haywood’s ‘clear understanding of the relation between personal and public interest’. H. Koon, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Female Spectator’, HLQ, 42:1 (Winter 1978), pp. 43–55, on p. 45. 18 Female Spectator, in Works II, 2, pp. 17, 18. 19 R. Ballaster and others, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 60. 20 J. Hodges, ‘The Female Spectator, a Courtesy Periodical’, in R. P. Bond (ed.), Studies in the Early English Periodical (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 153–82, on p. 176.

42  Kathryn R. King 21 G. M. Firmager, Introduction, in G. M. Firmager (ed.), The Female Spectator, Being Selections from Mrs Eliza Haywood’s Periodical, First Published in Monthly Parts (1744–6) (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p. 3. 22 King, Preface, in Female Spectator, Works II, 2, p. x. 23 Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism, p. 124. 24 Spacks, Selections, p. xiii. 25 Ballaster, Women’s Worlds, p. 58. 26 Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism, p. 121. The letters, whether real or fictional, ‘serve an important purpose within the periodical by bridging the gap between literary professionalism and genteel amateurism’ (p. 130). 27 See especially M. N. Powell, Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012). 28 Powell, Performing Authorship, p. 150. 29 Pettit, ‘Pickering & Chatto’, p. 42. 30 Ibid., pp. 42, 43. 31 Ibid., p. 50. 32 Ibid. 33 Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism, p. 123. 34 P. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), p. 438. Spedding describes the ‘ideal copy’ of the first edition as ‘a set of four volumes, with part-titles cancelled and each volume bound with general title, dedication, index and frontispiece’ (p. 439). 35 P. Spedding, ‘Measuring the Success of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6)’, in Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and ‘The Female Spectator’, pp. 193–211, on p. 200. 36 M. N. Powell, ‘Eliza Haywood, Periodicalist(?)’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 14:4 (Fall 2014), pp. 163–86, on p. 168. 37 Spedding, ‘Measuring the Success of Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–6)’, p. 194. 38 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), p. 12. 39 A. Wolf, ‘The Female Spectator and the New Story of Eliza Haywood’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 33:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 74–82, on p. 76. 40 Powell, ‘Eliza Haywood’, p. 165. 41 Ibid., p. 182. 42 For good discussions, see Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism, Chapters 8 and 9; and Powell, Performing Authorship, Chapter 4. 43 For an example of new directions in current research, see Jennie Batchelor’s work on Lady’s Magazine (1770–1840), in http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/ ladys-magazine/.

4 Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality Daniel Robinson

It was a row of very high books – ‘My treasures’, she called them. Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking with their rounded corners and Gothic titles like so many Bibles. Sartor Resartus, also Emerson’s Essays. Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp, leathery, artistic little editions that one gives at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give. Macaulay’s History, Thomas à Kempis, Mrs. Browning. Miss Fulkes did not select any of them. She put her hand behind the best that has been thought and said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds. A ribbon marked her place. She opened and began to read… —Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928)1 Here, then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels? The original impulse was to poetry. The ‘supreme head of song’ was a poetess. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)2

Running my eyes over the list of contents for this volume of essays devoted to the editing of women’s writing, I cannot help but ask, why is my essay the only one devoted to poetry? Like Virginia Woolf’s, the question itself implies the answer. The recovery of – and thus the editing of – Anglophone women’s writing from 1670 to 1840 has produced more new editions of women’s prose than women’s poetry and a considerably greater amount of critical commentary on novels than on poetry. Certainly, more women wrote novels than poetry, so there is more of the former to edit. The great writers of whom Woolf is thinking – Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot – were novelists, whereas the only woman poet to emerge from the nineteenth century with any ­reckonable status is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as noted in Aldous Huxley’s

44  Daniel Robinson satirical ­passage from Point Counter Point, ­published just months before A Room of One’s Own. Woolf, as a reader and reviewer, certainly was aware of some of the women poets from the nineteenth century; her question, therefore, may imply that the only ‘works of women’ deserving of a place on her bookshelf are novels. In other words, the implied question of worth is founded either on Woolf’s valuing such books enough to own and display them or on whether or not books of poetry by eighteenthand nineteenth-century women are available for purchase or even for reading; the latter option is a different kind of valuing, a more social one that involves reputable worth, the poet’s afterlife. Of course, it is not that women did not write poetry; rather, it is that interest in the poetry they did write – then, now and in-between – has been fleeting and sporadic. Woolf’s question, therefore, is a question of archive, of availability and access as much as it is of an inclination towards prose fiction. Elsewhere in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf, looking back to the English Renaissance, asks ‘why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet’.3 Again, it is not that women did not write poetry; rather, it is that very little of it appears in ‘squashy leather […] like so many Bibles’. As critics, we might like to do away with literary canons altogether because of their inherent limitations and inevitable caprices; however, as editors, we would not dispense with them because we are the ones who make them. And remake them. In this essay, I draw upon my experience editing the complete poetry of Romantic-period poet Mary Robinson for Pickering & Chatto’s eight-volume Works of Mary Robinson, published 2009–2010 under the general editorship of William Brewer. After spending several years preparing this first complete scholarly edition of Robinson’s poetry, writing the first monograph on it was the natural next step in the recovery of her work. In that work, I wanted to treat her as a poet – particularly to distance my own study from sensational portrayals of her celebrity and concomitant sexuality, the ubiquitous ‘Perdita’ epithet that marked her in the gossip pages as a particularly fascinating courtesan.4 But I found that, while I could avoid many of those trappings, Robinson’s poetry continually imposes upon my reading what I have described as a hetero-erotic poetics, forcing me to recognize her as a woman poet – one whom her more charitable contemporaries dubbed ‘the English Sappho’ but who wanted instead to be the English Petrarch. 5 From a critical perspective, I could work with this intertextual, formally allusive cross-dressing with, I hope, interesting results. The problem for me has been reconciling her compelling, daring performances of poetic ambition with the actual products of it. She sometimes succeeds – as in her greatest work, Sappho and Phaon (1796) – but her failures appear all the more acute precisely because of the hyperbole of her own self-representations. Even when measured by eighteenth-century tastes and what is discernible

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  45 of the horizon of expectations for women’s poetry, Robinson’s work – in verse and in prose – frequently gives the impression of having been composed in haste (certainly the result of the exigencies of her dire personal circumstances) and of consequent incoherence and/or banality. Several striking poems justify Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s assessment of Robinson as ‘a woman of undoubted Genius’, 6 and some are what I would call ‘pretty good’ poems; many others are practically indistinguishable – even to her modern editor – from the mass of anonymous mediocre poetry printed daily in London’s newspapers. So, my plan for this essay originally was to ask questions about the quality of the poetry I, and others, have put back into print. However, these are the wrong questions, so I want only to briefly consider that question of the quality of her writing – consider it, not answer it. I will devote more attention to more pressing questions regarding the quality of the reading we do as critics and how that question affects the quality of the editing that we do as textual scholars.

Quality of writing So, women from the period we study wrote poetry, but do we want to read it? Why is it that in Huxley’s satire, excerpted above, the only woman writer on this particular bookshelf is Mrs Browning, who was, like Wordsworth, Longfellow and Tennyson, a poet? If we want to read the poetry surely, then, editions of it will be forthcoming. In my field, British Romanticism, the recovery of women writers has been complicated, though with fascinating results, by the monolithic Big Six (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats) – all men, all poets, all good (whatever that means). Given the strange dislocation of Jane Austen from the Romantic period for most of the twentieth century, rediscovering and studying other women novelists writing with her during the age of the Big Six was revivifying and continues to be fruitful. The Romantic canon, fully established only as recently as the 1950s, would seem to have reified a masculine, masculinist poetic tradition, so getting novels by Ann Radcliffe, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Hannah More and Amelia Opie into Broadview editions as quickly as possible became a critical imperative during the last decade of the twentieth century. Even if the quality of the prose – at least by standards shaped by Austen – may not be up to snuff (such as, say, all of Robinson’s novels), these books have plots, characters, gendered stereotypes, genre-d stereotypes, submerged referents, cultural commentary and other lisible features that may be made scriptible with some critical ingenuity, an axe to grind, a cause to serve. The sexism behind the neglect of women’s poetry notwithstanding, it also happens to be true that much women’s poetry from our period seems to be, well, not so great. While there is much to be said about the

46  Daniel Robinson poetry of, say, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans and others read through critical lenses ground by gender and politics, these poems – at least as measured by Wordsworth, who is generally considered to be the greatest poet of the age – are often unreadable because we have no equipment for reading them as poems instead of as documents. Discussing such matters as literary merit has proven to be difficult when it comes to the recovery of non-canonical poets especially because, frankly, much of their writing does not seem to be as good as that of the more familiar poets whom we are better equipped to read and to explicate. With respect to the question of whether or not Felicia Hemans’s poetry is any good, or if it is as good as that of Byron or Keats, Susan J. Wolfson reminds us that this kind of question is ‘culturally over-determined’ and that we have had more than two centuries to shape the ways in which readers experience and appreciate the Big Six.7 For writers who have been absent from our reading lists during that time, it is not so much a matter of recovering them as it is of recovering ways of understanding them. Contextual approaches such as feminist criticism and New Historicism have done much of this work. But, to put it another way, from formalist perspectives – including some old-fashioned ones such as New Criticism or Yale-School Deconstruction – these poems seem too easy. Appreciating poems by Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Tighe and Anna Barbauld requires an aesthetic methodology derived from an understanding of a trajectory from Virgil to Milton filtered through Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717), itself an adaptation of an Ovidian poetics, plus Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), coupled with the poetry of William Collins, Joseph Warton and Thomas Warton, all transformed by late-eighteenth-century popular culture into the cloying confection that is literature of Sensibility.8 This is a lot of unpalatable poetry, with seemingly no nutritional value, to digest. But it is necessary to process it in order to understand fully the formal, generic and gendered horizon of expectations for women’s poetry of the Romantic period – which is manifestly not a literature of their own – and to enable us to see their innovations. By contrast, novels seem to offer immediate interest just on the basis of their having fundamental and recognizable features. The confluence of feminist criticism with cultural studies and the so-called New Historicism has demonstrated that we (readers, critics, instructors) can do something with even a book such as The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds, Huxley’s fictional fiction from Point Counter Point. Huxley’s satire on Miss Fulkes’s preferred reading makes a remarkable, if not uncanny, pairing with Woolf’s own survey of her bookshelf. Whereas Woolf is (more generously) thinking of Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot – accomplished women writers read by women and men – Huxley’s point is that the kind of reading generally

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  47 preferred – and not only by young women – is more fun and more consumable than that which is enshrined, visually canonized, in ‘squashy leather and looking with their rounded corners and Gothic titles like so many Bibles’. Here lay our poets – Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson. And Mrs Browning. Robinson had a confidence in her poetry that, given her disappearance for two centuries, may seem absurd. But she knew that her literary afterlife could not be as shrewdly manipulated, as some celebrities are able to manage a more ephemeral publicity and notoriety. For instance, Robinson’s proto-feminist tract, A Letter to the Women of England (1799), concludes with a ‘List of British Female Literary Characters Living in the Eighteenth Century’, including herself, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft, amongst others. This list is curiously impartial because it is not necessarily a list of the best women writers but, rather, merely a list of women writers who exist. Robinson adds to it, There are various degrees of merit in the compositions of the female writers mentioned in the preceding list. Of their several claims to the wreath of Fame, the Public and the critics are left to decide. Most of them have been highly distinguished at the tribunal of literature.9 The emphasis is hers. We should remember that, at the end of Robinson’s career, upon her death in December 1800 – just before the second edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in print – the careers of Wordsworth and Coleridge were not off to particularly auspicious starts; and critics would lambaste Wordsworth’s poetry for several years to come. For Robinson, her own investment in poetic merit, her claim ‘to the wreath of Fame’, was everything. And, desperate for money and for health, at the end of a career of remarkable vicissitudes and of a life that spanned only a little more than four decades, all Robinson could do was make that claim as vehemently, as ferociously even, as she could. Even as the editor of her poetry and author of a monograph about it, I never have been willing to go so far as asserting that ‘she changed the very nature of the craft of poetry’.10 I worry that in the heat of our enthusiasm for the recovery of non-canonical writers – and I have noted this with respect to men writers too – we risk seeming ridiculous to posterity, if we already do not to our contemporaries, by exaggerating the quality of the writing. Making grand claims for the quality or the importance of this material does not help the cause. For a time, scholars found citing contemporary reviews as a way to measure the esteem in which our writers were held by their contemporaries; however, a deeper understanding of the politics of reviewing reveals just how arbitrary and biased these assessments were and are – much like reviewing today. Moreover, favourable reviews of women poets ought not be read and cited in a vacuum that ignores the

48  Daniel Robinson unfavourable reviews of the poets we now consider to be great. Doing so sets up a problematic inverse whereby the women poets seem all the more ridiculous – or at least all the more mundane – for being admired by a literary establishment oblivious to the genius of, say, Wordsworth or Keats, whose most important, and most studied, works failed to garner the effusive notices that Robinson’s or Hemans’s did. Taken all in all, Robinson’s positive reviews and puffs appear to have been written – if not by her friends, her publishers, or, in a few instances, possibly by herself – by critics too chivalrous to write a harsh word of a ‘poetess’ or to take her work too seriously.

Quality of reading Our writers look all the more ridiculous when the quality of our reading does not result in sufficient support to justify our claims. The problem with reading and thus with editing Romantic-period women’s poetry is that doing so requires either a model of gender-genre difference, in the tradition of Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter, or a modulation of ­gender-genre sameness to account for women poets’ participation in what had become – prior to ‘Mrs Browning’ – a men poets’ arena of competition for alpha-male status, of poetic peacocking, Miltonic machismo and Spenserian sprezzatura.11 If our concern is primarily the recovery of women’s writing and its place in literary history, then we are participating in the larger project of history – making known aspects of the past that are now unknown without necessarily asking whether or not this knowledge is particularly valuable except in so far as it was previously unknown or forgotten. For those of us employed in English departments, however, the history of our discipline involves (or has involved) the study of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ – as Huxley comically repurposes the cliché in the epigraph above – and, as we all know by now, the critical lenses through which we see what is the best have been equally opaque with regard to books such as The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds and the works of ‘Mrs Browning’. But part of literary history’s history is that writers may lose their place in it. In our rage for the historical recovery of writers from the past who were once important we have tended to forget that the grinding of those lenses is part of the story too – and that we can still see through them if we choose to. The four poets of Huxley’s grouping, male and female, even thus enshrined had, during the heyday of Modernism, the patina of bourgeois pretentiousness – also signalled by Huxley’s satire. Even so, we know what to do with them. And now we know what to do with the books that a Miss Fulkes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have read and enjoyed – Northanger Abbey notwithstanding. It is much harder to know what to do with a poem that the New Critics have not already identified as having sufficient ambiguity and paradox to make it

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  49 worth reading. While, for example, Elaine Showalter’s paradigm would seem to draw upon Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, it provides an insufficient answer to Woolf’s question by implying that it is right and proper for women to write novels – not because that is all they could do but because doing so becomes political empowerment in its difference from the masculine literary tradition. Showalter’s vantage, notably, starts precisely where ours ends – at 1840. In ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ she famously begins women’s literary history with the ‘Feminine’ phase, 1840–1880, followed by the ‘Feminist’ phase, 1880–1920, and the ‘Female’ phases, 1920 to at least 1979.12 But, factitious as such divisions are, Showalter’s chronology is apposite to my view that some women writers, such as Mary Robinson, assert in their poetics, not a model of difference, but one of sameness. It is actually the formal and generic sameness of men’s and women’s writing that tends to be obscured. Elizabeth Barrett Browning would disagree, but she has not set the terms for the discussion during the second half of the nineteenth century or for the recovery of women writers during the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. But what if she had done? Would Robinson or, say, Mary Tighe – probably the most formally astute of Romantic-period women poets – have been celebrated for their poetry? Or would they have met the same fate because their poetry may have been found to be not as good as poetry inscribed by the tradition Browning herself validates – by contemporary standards or by today’s? Criticism, therefore, is important to editing, and vice versa, because the prevalence of one justifies the publication of the other. New critical lenses are necessary to teach new ways of reading and thereby new ways of evaluating the worthiness of the reading itself – whether we want to call it ‘great’ or ‘important’. The question of quality is at the root of scholarly editing because, as we all know, paper costs money and, even if we produce paperless editions, work costs time. This is all obvious, but I dwell on it because new critical approaches stimulate new interest in writers and works, thus creating a demand for new editions for study or for teaching; conversely, the availability of new works, particularly in affordable trade editions, may inspire instructors to incorporate new material into their reading lists for students, as well as providing critics and scholars with handy starting points for new work. But the whole point of writing criticism is also to instruct readers – and thus to provide instructors with teaching strategies – in ways of reading. Newly recovered works and writers for which none of these tools are available will fade back into obscurity. The challenge then is how to promote interest in women Romantic poets without at the same time polishing the monument to Wordsworth and thus to Milton. Similarly, following Stuart Curran and not wishing to lose the currency of the term ‘Romanticism’ (pace Jerome J. McGann), Marlon B. Ross and Anne K. Mellor each attempted in their own ways to define masculine and feminine

50  Daniel Robinson versions of Romanticism that had to compete against one another in a kind of Blakean dynamic of opposition and tension.13 But what to do with women poets who are not Elizabeth Barrett Browning and who, nevertheless, seem to have been keen to participate in masculine traditions, eager to jump in the ring with Milton gloves ready? That is, women poets, former poetesses, who want simply to be poets. It is telling that, despite the new attention Robinson has attracted – the Works, several Broadview editions, three biographies published roughly within one year of one another, and a pot-boiling romance novel that describes her as ‘a woman who changed history by doing as she pleased – for money, for fame, for pleasure, and above all, for love’ – Curran’s articles on Robinson from 1988 to 2002 contain the best close readings of her poetry (although I hope mine are at least competent compared with them).14 Few other critics have taken an interest in the craft of Robinson’s poetry, its formal features – those things that make it poetry and not just another text or cultural artefact. Curran’s ‘The I Altered’ (1988) was a watershed in the recovery of Romantic-period women poets, providing a means of reading them. This groundbreaking essay, important and insightful as it is, attempts to create a paradigm for reading women’s poetry outside of the traditional framework of masculine Romanticism and thus, even though it deals exclusively with poetry, operates according to a difference model for women’s poetry. Curran finds a locus for women’s poetry of the Romantic period in quotidian values, domestic concerns and themes of alienation – including brilliant readings of poems by Robinson, Jane Taylor, Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith and Ann Yearsley. But it is an argument built on the question of quality: ‘The achievement of these women poets was to create literature from perspectives necessarily limited by the hegemony of male values’.15 What interests me most about Curran’s readings is that he is not willing to treat the poetry as a historically significant cultural document but as literature and the writers as having achieved something artistically important. Besides this essential move by Curran, it seems to me that the amount of recent critical commentary on Robinson’s poetry – actual close readings of it – is disproportionately low compared to the amount of interest in Robinson’s person or persona. If my monograph is all there is to say about the poetry as poetry then either Mary Robinson’s career or Daniel Robinson’s career is doomed. Brilliant work has been done on women poets of the Romantic period since Curran’s groundbreaking essay, but most of it has been grounded in historical recovery, developing a deeper understanding of the context for ‘Romanticism’ or showing how predetermined reading strategies established later have excluded women’s poetry from the canon. One reaction, therefore, has been not to read it at all – but to contextualize it because applying those predetermined reading strategies is both ahistorical and ideologically inconsistent with the enterprise of recovery.

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  51

Quality of editing The work of an editor doing recovery has to be in conversation with the canon that makes the work of recovery necessary in the first place. An unwillingness to engage seriously with the masculine poetic tradition, for example, does no favours for the women poets we wish to recover. This lack of attention is possibly why we have had new editions of women’s poetry appear in print without proper indentations for odes, other lyrics and verse paragraphs – even one major edition that lacks line numbers for the poems in it. Such deficiencies either are the result of inattentive proofreading, rushing to publication or failing to compare the formal conventions of other more canonical scholarly editions with the present enterprise. At any rate, they render the edition useless and obsolete. If interest in the women poets represented by these relatively recent editions continues, then future editors will have the opportunity to rectify such mistakes; but these deficiencies also risk drawing unwanted comparisons between the seriousness with which editors treat traditionally canonical men poets, who have renowned scholarly editions and successive editors who over time have improved them, and non-canonical or newly canonical women poets whose reputations may not have inspired any posthumous retransmissions of their work. We cannot correct judgements of women’s writing as not-as-good with not-as-good editions. This is not to say that my edition of Robinson’s poetry is free of errors – either of ignorance, oversight or misjudgement – but I do believe that my interest in and enthusiasm for the way Milton’s and Wordsworth’s poems have been printed made me want to treat Robinson’s the same way. The genealogy of reading on the part of the editor is going to affect the products of editing. Certainly this is true of all literature; however, as I know well, the thought that combing through the works of Milton or Pope will be necessary to annotate poems never before annotated is particularly daunting and overwhelming. Google helps, but still. A volume of essays such as this one begs certain questions: chief amongst them, from the point of view of a textual editor, how much does it – or should it – matter that the writer whose works are being prepared for transmission or retransmission is a woman? Certainly, to a textual scholar, a text is a text and editing it, preparing it for retransmission, is a generic enterprise. However, it is possibly or probably true that most women’s writing from our period, 1670–1840, poses a greater challenge to locating an interesting variety of witnesses, particularly manuscripts, presuming a greater ephemerality of documents due to the manifest disregard of women’s writing and women writers, particularly evident in the decades following 1840 or so. It seems, then, to be the case that such papers are to be found – or yet to be found – in private collections, obscure archives or amongst memorabilia in the attics of descendants or other devisees. Generally speaking, textual criticism of women’s writing

52  Daniel Robinson largely has to make do with only printed texts as witnesses. The more than 500 poems in my edition of Mary Robinson’s poetry for Pickering & Chatto, for instance, are reprints of the first-published versions of her poems, or editio princeps, with substantive variants collated from later publication during the author’s lifetime or shortly after her death. Indeed, there was very little republication of Robinson’s poetry more than six years after her death in 1800. For my edition I was able to examine a few autograph poems copied in letters here and there – often after publication – but no manuscripts or fair copies for any of her poetry are known to exist. Sadly, this story is likely all too familiar to everyone who works on women writers. The fleeting literary careers of many of the women writers we now wish to edit – in any genre – make their manuscripts, letters and other autography all the more ephemeral. As a result, editing the poetry of even particularly noteworthy women writers presents a different set of challenges not unlike those faced by editors of classical texts for which no originals exist. It is certainly different from editing, say, someone like Wordsworth, whose textual history consists of an overabundance of papers both fair and foul. But even editing Wordsworth’s poetry – a project in which I am currently engaged – when one really digs into the massive amount of material that has been preserved, it can drive one to despair at the realization that some incredibly valuable and well-loved poems do not actually exist, at least not in any authoritative or definitive state. However, because it is Wordsworth all of this material can be represented – enshrined even – in a twenty-plus-volume, forty-year editorial project such as the Cornell Wordsworth. When it comes to a recently recovered woman writer, the discovery of manuscript materials is a particularly salutary event. But the editorial representation of these materials is fraught with other difficulties. For without enough other witnesses, fair copies, drafts, page proofs, even newly discovered exemplars can be of dubious value. It is particularly important, therefore, that provenance, authority, lacunae and conjecture be documented as meticulously as possible. Because of the scarcity of such evidence, editions of women writers in recent years – in the enthusiasm of recovery – have presented texts that would not have passed muster for, say, W. W. Greg or Fredson Bowers. This probably would include my own edition of Mary Robinson, although there I do not claim to represent versions necessarily authorized by the author, only texts that were made public and thus contributed to Robinson’s profession and her literary career. We lack the manuscripts and page proofs to know for sure how much of the printed material is authoritative. It is impossible to determine, therefore, how much of the reprinted and revised material in the 1806 Poetical Works was actually corrected by Robinson and not by her daughter, Maria Elizabeth Robinson, or her literary executor, Samuel Jackson Pratt.

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  53 The future publication of distinctly different editions of women’s writing may be improbable due to the lack of surviving materials. So, the question of quality is not entirely about whether the poetry is good or not. The ultimate question of quality is contingent upon the work’s relationship to the canon, but not only whether the text in question meets the criteria for quality established by the canon. ‘Quality’ also has to do with the archive, with what is accessible and available. The relationship of the previously neglected woman writer to the canon may be forever tenuous due to the nature of the archive, and this determines the work an editor can do. The quality of an edition, therefore, is contingent upon, in effect, the quality of the archive. For this reason, a scholarly edition of a neglected woman writer’s work is slouching towards obsolescence when we cannot return to the archive: it is exhausted, there is nothing more there. Unless new documents are found, the archive for a woman writer such as Mary Robinson is not an infinitely renewable resource, opening up new versions of familiar works every time we go to it. New editions of women’s writing, therefore, may face a more rapidly accruing obsolescence than, say, the Cornell Wordsworth, which made available the dizzying array of Wordsworth’s manuscript materials, thus distinguishing it sharply from the standard edition by Ernest De Selincourt, revised by Helen Darbishire. But it may be that heretofore unknown documents by Robinson will be found. Many of the papers now owned by the Wordsworth Trust and available to scholars were not known to exist by Wordsworth’s nineteenth-century editors, William Knight and Thomas Hutchinson. The 1805 Prelude – considered by many, including me, to be vastly superior to the one Wordsworth wanted us to read, the one published in 1850 – was not discovered until early in the twentieth century and not published until 1926. Many of these materials, however, had been in the possession of the Wordsworth family until the Wordsworth grandchildren bequeathed them in 1935 to what was then just a library at Dove Cottage in Grasmere and is now the Jerwood Centre, a cultural institution with an extensive apparatus whose charge is preservation. Mary Robinson had no family to preserve her papers beyond a daughter who never married and who appears to have put into print everything she had at hand. Manuscripts of Robinson’s two comedies, The Lucky Escape and Nobody, survive in the Larpent collection at the Huntington Library as they were originally submitted for licensing for the stage. The portion of the manuscript of Robinson’s Memoirs in her own hand survives; the ‘Continuation by a Friend’ published in 1801 is likely by Maria Elizabeth Robinson or Pratt, as Hester Davenport conjectures, but we cannot know for sure. There are only a handful of autograph letters. It is impossible to know what else is out there. An editing project that involves the assembling, collating, recording of many documents provides the editor with a richer inventory of materials. By this I do not mean, for example, that Frankenstein is a richer literary

54  Daniel Robinson work than Persuasion because it has a more complicated textual history. But the editor of Frankenstein has more textual work to do, more decisions to make, more possibilities for re-presentation. With a writer such as Wordsworth, whose papers have been preserved (much of it in the hands of the adoring women in his life), an editor faces many interesting, often difficult decisions when establishing editorial principles. De Selincourt’s edition favours the final authorized version, which he presumes usually is the last printed one; the Cornell Wordsworth, under the general editorship of Stephen Parrish, began its enterprise upon the premise that the first completed version, in manuscript fair-copy if possible, is the best text. Over the course of its publication, the series editors found that they had to modify and rethink the original principles, resulting in a frustratingly inconsistent but magnificent feat of editorial prowess. But this inconsistency derives from the quality of the archive – it seems perpetually rich and, surprisingly, given the massive scope, presents even more possibilities for new editions, for the transmission of new, unfamiliar versions of familiar poems and different reading texts from those in either the De Selincourt-Darbishire or the Cornell editions. Editing Wordsworth, daunting still, presents still new challenges, requires new theorizations through having the opportunity to make choices based not on what is accessible or available but on other criteria. In other words, Wordsworth’s texts have been worked over so many times by so many different editors that an editor wishing to present something new must justify the project and can do because of the Cleopatra-like ‘infinite variety’ of the archive. However, of course, with a writer such as Mary Robinson one takes what one can get. If we can come to think of Robinson not so much as a neglected writer but rather as a networked professional the archive may continue to expand. But the quality of neglected women’s poetry is always going to be called into question because we do not have the material conditions at our disposal to make ‘quality’ editions. I use ‘quality’ here with some irony: I mean, the depth of interesting work for an editor to do and the richness of the sources we can represent in the apparatus criticus. If the quality of the archive is lacking, the best we do is to produce accurate reprints of what already printed material remains; yet, due to the scanty archive, much of what we do is transcription, retransmission. The only big choice I had to make was whether to print as reading texts the poems as they first appeared or as they appeared in the posthumous Poetical Works of 1806. I chose the former because I felt that it would be important to catch the poems in the instant of their publicity, given the contemporary celebrity of the poet in question. This did afford the opportunity of making an apparatus criticus that showed some occasionally significant revisions. But, as far as I know, most of Robinson’s poetry was printed no more than two or three times in authorized publications. And the final 1806 printing shows some signs of

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  55 editorial tampering by someone, again, possibly Robinson’s daughter or a friend. My introduction and annotations frame Robinson’s work in terms of political, professional and personal circumstances and, as the first full scholarly edition, in terms of her literary reading and references; identifying these important contextual and intertextual relationships was stimulating, but I found my work on the edition to be mechanical, requiring little actual editorial judgement because I so frequently had only a single witness to a work. The most interesting unprinted source I was able to find was an annotated copy of Robinson’s 1775 Poems in the British Library. While none of the poems from Mary Robinson’s 1775 volume reappeared in print, the British Library has a copy with handwritten errata inscribed on the final page and initialled ‘M. R.’. Hester Davenport speculates that this may have been the copy Robinson gave to her mother.16 These corrections do seem authoritative and appropriate based on the sense of the poems. However, since they are somewhat questionable, I have indicated these corrections as variants. So, while this find gave me something to work with, Robinson herself considered the 1775 poems to be unworthy of republication and excluded them from her own oeuvre. Most of these poems are insipid imitations of Anna Aikin’s (later Barbauld) excellent 1773 Poems. They do not appear in the 1806 Works, so I got to exercise editorial muscle on poems the quality of which the author herself had no doubt. Like many editors, I was hindered at times by the ephemerality of the media in which Robinson frequently published, chiefly newspapers. Much of the poetry printed in her 1791 Poems first appeared in the newspapers The World and The Oracle; I reprint, therefore, the texts from those papers and present variants in my apparatus. However, I feel certain that more of the poems from that volume first appeared on days of the papers that are not known to be extant; so, all I could do was print the texts of poems from 1791, not knowing which of these may have appeared first in either paper. I also missed a few printings of Robinson’s poetry, but it so far appears that I have not missed any poems. For example, one poem ‘Lines Written on a Day of Public Rejoicing’ appears as the final poem in my edition, where I mistakenly placed it as having first appeared in 1806.17 Although the 1806 text differs in only a couple of substantives from the 1797 text, the poem actually belongs amongst the poems of December 1797 from the Morning Post – as Adriana Craciun proved.18 Since the edition was published, I have come across a few other printings of Robinson’s poems that do not present interesting variants but that yield a fuller picture of Robinson’s professional networks and a sense of which poems newspaper editors thought would most amuse readers. For example, the recent discovery, much to my chagrin, that Robinson’s ‘Ode to Humanity’ appeared first in Lloyd’s Evening Post on 19 September 1792, instead of in John Bell’s The Oracle on 20 September, as previously thought, complicates my reading in the monograph of

56  Daniel Robinson Robinson as ‘Bell’s Laureate’. Meanwhile, I missed re-printings of one of Robinson’s most widely published poems, ‘Stanzas, Written between Dover and Calais, July 24th, 1792’ (‘Bounding billow cease thy motion’), in both The Star and Lloyd’s Evening Post the day after its first publication in Bell’s Oracle on 2 August 1792. I had presumed a greater degree of exclusivity granted to Bell, originally finding only subsequent reprints in the European Magazine later in October and then in all subsequent collections of her poems. These other versions do not greatly affect what is recorded in my apparatus criticus, but they do change the picture of her career and the critical work I have done on the poems in it, based on my editorial judgements. Since there are extant very few unique witnesses the value of a future edition in print of Robinson’s writing is questionable: nearly all of the printed materials are available online as it is, via Google Books, ECCO or the Burney Collection, so a future print edition cannot even boast the premium of providing copyright-protected transmissions – until or unless more transcriptions come to light. Because of such scanty returns for textual criticism, a new edition of the works of a recently recovered woman writer such as Robinson faces obsolescence, threatening a return to obscurity for a writer whose material textuality promises little in the way of controversial editorial intervention. For example, the reading texts for my edition of Robinson’s poetry do not differ greatly from those in Judith Pascoe’s watershed edition for Broadview – except that mine aims to be comprehensive whereas Pascoe’s is a selection.19 The value of such comprehensiveness is simply that. It is not that there are many better poems to be found in my edition versus Pascoe’s. I have considered a competing selected edition, but I cannot imagine a ‘best of’ that would differ significantly from Pascoe’s excellent volume. I wish for an opportunity to fix a few things that I know need correcting in my edition, but I feel certain that there never will be another print edition of the complete works of Mary Robinson. And unless some brilliant critics are able to explicate her poems with surprisingly insightful and rewarding results, I doubt there will ever be a need or a demand for it. An edition is only as useful as the uses others make of it for reading and criticism. By contrast, during the past thirty years, Wordsworth has taken a beating from ideological critics associated with feminist criticism and New Historicism; in spite of this, it is the proliferation of versions to be found in the mass of manuscript material and the poet’s obsessive revising, reordering and reprinting that have revivified Wordsworth studies, have preserved his status as the central figure of Anglophone Romanticism, and have nullified the previously entrenched view of Wordsworth as the musty and fusty be-goggled sage of Rydal Mount – a poet only the Victorians could love. But at least the Victorians loved him; Mary Robinson is hardly to be found in records after 1806. In 1813 William Lane, founder of the

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  57 Minerva Press, republished Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon; in 1824 a reprint of the 1806 Poetical Works appeared, followed in 1825 by Alexander Dyce’s Specimens of British Poetesses, which includes four poems by Robinson. After that, interest in Robinson’s poetry – or, really, much interest in her as a person – is slight until J. Fitzgerald Molloy published a new edition of the Memoirs in 1895; two years later Joseph Knight’s entry on Robinson appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. In the twentieth century, she re-emerged as ‘Perdita’, the sexually profligate inamorata of more important men. 20 Unlike other women poets of the Romantic period, with the possible exception of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Robinson’s recovery has been fuelled by the spirited imagining of parallels with the popular culture of our own time and a kind of scholarly frisson in relation to her contemporary celebrity. 21 These studies are insightful and provocative and have contributed greatly to this facet of her life and career. Moreover, I likely would not be writing about Robinson today had she not been dubbed the eighteenth-century Madonna by Anne K. Mellor and Jacqueline M. Labbe. 22 Does the comparison of ‘the Lost One’ with ‘the Material Girl’ have something to do with the fact that everyone has seen Madonna naked  via her own self-representations in music videos, movies and coffee-table books? Although intended as an allegory of female celebrity-culture empowerment, this particular pop-star epithet trades on a kind of notoriety that, if not entirely salacious, is not entirely serious either. Madonna, for all her talent and success, is not Milton. Like Wordsworth, Robinson had her sights set on Milton and immortality. To read and write about her poetry, and to edit her works, we would do well to treat her, not as a woman writer, but as a poet, perhaps different in degree, but not in kind, from Wordsworth, Longfellow, Tennyson and, of course, ‘Mrs Browning’. Robinson’s own ‘hetero-erotic poetics’ make having to do so all the more poignant – and interesting – because she maintains, in her poetry, a kind of erotic ontology whereby men and women frequently are at odds with one another as they pursue the sexual (and biblical) telos of becoming one flesh, as temporal as she knows that state to be. She never wants you to forget that she is a woman but neither does she want you to construe – or to construct – her as a poetess rather than as a poet, for therein lies the qualification she knows to be similarly temporal. She was playing the long game, as it were, for poetic immortality – or at least that particular topos served her ingenuity, which was prodigious (possibly in the archaic sense of ‘unnatural’ as well, as Coleridge marvelled of her ‘overflowing’ mind). 23 Even so, she is forever caught between being ‘Mrs Robinson’ and ‘Robinson’, between ‘Perdita’ and ‘Sappho’, between ‘Laura’ and ‘Petrarch’. She thus puts her readers, her critics, her biographers and her editors in a double bind. That quandary is in itself a way to read her work and is the saving grace of her recovery.

58  Daniel Robinson

Notes 1 A. Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), pp. 188–9. 2 V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Granada Publishing, 1929), ed. Mark Hussey (New York: Harcourt, 2005), p. 65. 3 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 41. 4 D. Robinson, The Poetry of Mary Robinson : Form and Fame (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 5 She was first hailed as ‘our English Sappho’ in a December 1791 review of her first volume from the Monthly Review. I cite other instances of the ‘Sappho’ epithet and Robinson’s appropriation of it throughout the aforementioned monograph, but see particularly chapter 3, pp. 111–52. 6 Coleridge wrote of Robinson to Robert Southey on 27 January 1800: She is a woman of undoubted Genius. There was a poem of her’s [sic] in this Morning’s paper which both in metre and matter pleased me much – She overloads everything; but I never knew a human Being with so full a mind – bad, good, & indifferent, I grant you, but full, & overflowing. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), vol. 1, p. 562. 7 S. J. Wolfson, Borderlines : The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 35. 8 For a discussion of how poorly equipped we are to read this poetry, especially after Modernism, see J. J. McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility : A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 1–9. One passage seems particularly apt in relation to my epigraph from Huxley : ‘we custodians of culture are continually, professionally inclined to imagine that art ought to deliver the best that has been known and thought in the world, and – what is worse – to think of this “best” as a moral category’ (p. 5). 9 The Works of Mary Robinson, ed. W. D. Brewer and others (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009–2010), vol. 8: ed. W. D. Brewer and S. M. Setzer (2010), p. 163. 10 S. Curran, ‘Mary Robinson and the New Lyric’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 9–22, on p. 9. 11 E. Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976); E. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 12 E. Showalter, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, in M. Jacobus (ed.), Women Writing and Writing about Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 22–41. 13 See M. B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); A. K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (London: Routledge, 1993). 14 The novel is All for Love : The Scandalous Life and Times of Royal Mistress Mary Robinson (New York: New American Library, 2008) by A. Elyot (Leslie Carroll). In addition to the previously cited ‘Mary Robinson and the New Lyric’, see Curran, ‘The I Altered’, in A. K. Mellor (ed.), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185–207; and ‘Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context ’, in C. Shiner Wilson and J. Haefner (eds), Revisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776– 1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 17–35. The other books referenced here include the biographies, P. Byrne’s Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York:

Mary Robinson’s poetry and questions of quality  59

15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23

Random House, 2004); H. Davenport’s The Prince’s Mistress Perdita: A Life of Mary Robinson (the best one) (Stroud: Sutton, 2004); and S. Gristwood’s Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic (London: Bantam, 2005). Gristwood’s is the only one of the three not to be revised and republished in paperback. Note in the titles of these books the repeated emphasis on mistress. Curran, ‘The I Altered’, p. 205. Davenport, The Prince’s Mistress, p. 30. The Works of Mary Robinson, vol. 2: ed. D. Robinson (2009), p. 221. A. Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution : Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 79–80. M. Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. J. Pascoe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000). See, for example, S. V. Makower, Perdita: A Romance in Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1908); M. Steen, The Lost One : A Biography of Mary (Perdita) Robinson (London: Methuen, 1937); and R. D. Bass, The Green Dragoon : The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York: Alvin Redman, 1957). See T. Fulford, ‘The Electrifying Mary Robinson’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 25–35; M. Gamer and T. F. Robinson, ‘Mary Robinson and the Dramatic Art of the Comeback’, Studies in Romanticism, 48:2 (2009), pp.  219–56; T. Mole, ‘Mary Robinson’s Conflicted Celebrity’, in T. Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 186–205. A. K. Mellor, ‘Making an Exhibition of Her Self: Mary “Perdita” ­Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts of Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-­C entury Contexts, 22:3 (2000), pp. 271–304, on p. 300; J. M. Labbe, ‘Mary ­Robinson’s Bicentennial’, Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), pp. 3–8, on p. 4. See above, n. 6: Coleridge to Southey, in Collected Letters of Samuel ­Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, p. 562. For a discussion of Coleridge’s appreciation of ­Robinson’s ‘metre and matter’, see D. Robinson, The Poetry of Mary ­Robinson : Form and Fame, pp. 197–240.

5 Annotating Delarivier Manley Stripping away preconceptions of gender and genre Rachel Carnell Only provide as much information as is necessary in each footnote, an experienced scholarly editor advises us, as my co-editor and I began the task of editing and annotating the five-volume Selected Works of Delarivier Manley (2005), a comprehensive edition containing all of the works then ascribed to Manley (with the exception of two plays previously available in another collection by the same publisher).1 He suggests as a matter of procedure that we should never provide information merely for information’s sake. This seems perfectly reasonable advice at first, until it becomes clear that to provide information only as needed begs the question of what the information is needed for. 2 This traditional understated approach to editing may not always be appropriate, as my co-editor and I discovered, for non-canonical authors whose works cross the boundaries of traditional literary genres. If we feel a given work is an autobiography, then we need to provide relevant biographical information. If we view a text as a novel or a work of romance or a gossipy account of real persons at court, then we are faced with different options. Treating the work as a ‘romance’ novel, we might not identify the real persons behind each character at all. If we treat the work as court satire, then we would want to identify the persons behind the characters in a gossipy scene of seduction. In other words, there are questions logically prior to the question of what information is actually needed by a modern reader: how we annotate depends in part upon how we perceive the genre of the work. Is it an autobiography, a novel, a pamphlet, a dramatic tragedy or a work of satire? These genres and modes of writing, of course, are all familiar to us today. However, suppose a work is written in a genre less easy for modern readers to recognize? Suppose the work is a political secret history or a political secret history masquerading as an autobiographical memoir? Supposing the work, like Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714), is an innovative text bridging these and other genres? Following Alexander Pettit’s lead, we must ask when editing women authors ‘whether we will leave future generations editions that enable scholarship or impede it, texts that represent the women who wrote them or that distort and thus devalue their contributions’. 3 I suggest that

Annotating Delarivier Manley  61 when a writer is working in genres no longer recognizable to modern readers or within emerging genres or innovative genres that straddle the boundary between neo-classical and modern genres, then readers will want enough information to be able to decode the work across a range of different genres. While editing Manley, rather than being cautious not to offer information for information’s sake, I attempted to offer readers enough information to peruse the work in light of multiple possible genres and contexts. In editing Manley, our central task became the task of annotation: to make comprehensible texts with multiple references to the minutiae of partisan political squabbles from the reign of Queen Anne and to help readers decode Manley’s inventive use of genres (including the political secret history) no longer familiar or easily recognizable to modern readers. Issues of genre are necessarily connected to issues of canonicity: miscellaneous political writings have been taken less seriously by twentieth-­ century editors than poems, plays and novels. The matter of genre also, as its etymology suggests, may be related to questions of gender, especially when readers imagine eighteenth-century women writing novels and personal letters but less easily visualize them as writers of political satire and pamphlets. The process of editing and annotating Manley, then, was one of offering enough information so that readers could themselves begin to strip away modern misconceptions and misperceptions and re-situate her within her particular eighteenth-century context.

Editing the works of ‘non-Parnassus’ eighteenth-century authors A collection of essays focused on editing women writers might suggest that there is something intrinsically different about editing a female, rather than a male, writer. There is certainly a difference between editing Manley’s works and the works of a male Romantic poet such as William Wordsworth, but the difference between Wordsworth and Manley is not merely a matter of gender, but also a matter of canonical status and availability of manuscripts. Our experience editing Manley’s works was similar to the experience others have had editing other early eighteenth-century writers, male and female, canonical and non-­canonical. Editing Manley raised many of the same issues that Alexander Pettit experienced in editing works by Eliza Haywood and that Bob Owens faced in editing the works of Daniel Defoe. As Pettit suggests, the ‘paradigms of editing that have served us well with respect to the conventional canon are of limited applicability to the pluralistic canon that informs curricula and publication lists today’.4 For Pettit, editing Haywood clearly posed different questions than the ones raised in earlier twentieth-century scholarly debates about editing. Those debates had focused at first on the best way to establish

62  Rachel Carnell the author’s ‘intentions’, following the work of W. W. Greg, and subsequently on the best way to take into account what Jerome J. McGann described as ‘the history of the text in relation to the related histories of its production, reproduction, and reception’. 5 Current ideas about ‘high’ literature have shifted more quickly than have theories of editing. Pettit explains that ‘As our disciplinary focus shifts from considering literature as literature to considering literature as part of the messier enterprise of culture, or cultural history, editorial theory and practice continue to privilege a high-literary canon’. 6 While acknowledging McGann’s important work in challenging traditional scholarly preferences for private (manuscript) productions over public (first edition) productions, Pettit points out that ‘By promoting theories based on documentary profusion, McGann’s paradigm shows itself to be of limited applicability to the documentarily impoverished literature that has moved to the forefront of literary studies’.7 For Pettit, the task of the editor working with handwritten drafts of a manuscript is significantly different than the task of an editor with no handwritten copies of any of the author’s works. The significant difference, as Pettit argues, is between those authors who had the time for revision and supervision of printed and published copy and those that were working under constraints of time and money that gave them little time to fuss over such luxuries. These ‘non-Parnassian writers, whose textual records are evanescent or even spectral’, as Pettit describes them, pose an entirely different set of issues than faced by the editor, for example, of Wordsworth’s poetry, who must sift between multiple different handwritten versions of the same text dating from different eras. Canonical texts were often printed in multiple carefully produced editions, which benefitted from ‘postpublication correction’.8 As Pettit argues, the material conditions of production in many non-Parnassian eighteenth-century texts must be taken into consideration: Writers earned more if they published more, less if they published less. Master printers relied on the shop’s profits for their income, which in turn depended on production. Compositors were paid according to the amount of material they typeset. At the lower end of the scale, journeyman printers were usually paid by the job. Works became texts by way of a system that encouraged production, not precision. Texts, or at least the texts under consideration here, became terrible, regardless of the merits or demerits of the works that they transmitted.9 Manley’s works, some of which – such as her first publication, ­L etters Writen by Mrs. Manley – were produced in the sort of hastily  produced single-edition-only, certainly fit the model of non-Parnassian

Annotating Delarivier Manley  63 productions. Other works, particularly her best-selling secret histories, fit another non-Parnassian model, the ‘terrible’ edition. Patrick Spedding coined the term ‘terrible texts’ to describe several of Haywood’s best-selling works, including The Female Spectator, which exist in multiple and sometimes seemingly hastily produced editions, with few enough meaningful differences to justify a comprehensive comparison of them, as Pettit explains, summarizing an exchange with Patrick Spedding. Pettit concludes, the textual variants – the stuff of ‘bibliographical perfection,’ to adopt Spedding’s fanciful term – are unlikely to tell us enough about Haywood to justify the time and expense of cataloguing them. Such a project would require bottomless pockets, limitless freedom to travel, and inexhaustible reserves of time and patience.10 Pettit concludes that ‘for an author who routinely declined to revise her work – the profile of the busy commercial author – the potential for gain is slight’.11 Manley’s secret histories, particularly her Secret Memoirs and Manners…from the New Atalantis (1709), appeared in, to borrow Pettit’s term, multiple ‘terrible’ editions. Thus, my co-­ editor, Ruth Herman, and I chose the first edition as copy-text for The New Atalantis (as we did for most of Manley’s works), because the subsequent editions did not necessarily demonstrate a uniform set of (authorial) revisions. The many variants of the ‘second’ edition bear this out, as I explain in my textual introduction to The New Atalantis: Although all of these variants were, like the first edition, ‘printed for John Morphew and J. Woodward’, some printers seem to have taken it upon themselves to make a variety of minor corrections in punctuation and capitalization; others did not. There is, thus, no definitive ‘corrected’ edition. Subsequent ‘editions’ are, again, not properly corrected editions, in the modern sense; for example, the ‘sixth edition’ has fewer corrections than one variant of the ‘second edition’.12 We made note of certain passages omitted from the sixth edition, but we did not attempt to distinguish between the many differently ‘terrible’ versions of the ‘second edition’ for example. We might conclude from Pettit’s experience with Eliza Haywood and my experience with Manley, that ‘terrible texts’ are typical of

64  Rachel Carnell non-­canonical eighteenth-century women writers. Nevertheless, many male writers of the long eighteenth century were likewise excluded from some imaginary Mount Parnassus. Editing the works of Charles Gildon (c.1665–1724) – still known today as a ‘hack’ writer, and one not yet accorded a multi-volume hardcover edition – would pose challenges similar to those we experienced in editing Manley’s works. Even a writer now as canonical as Daniel Defoe is for his ‘novels’, in some measure still fits into the category of ‘non-Parnassian’ and miscellaneous author. As W. R. Owens explains in differentiating his approach in editing Defoe from standard practices for editing authors, these standard practices are based on two assumptions – first, that editors will have an abundance of documentary evidence to consider, and, second, that the most important feature of a scholarly edition is its focus on establishing an authoritative text. However, as Owens observes, ‘in the case of many authors from the long eighteenth century’, including Defoe, ‘these two assumptions do not hold true and because of this these authors seem to require a different kind of editorial treatment’.13 Owens distinguishes his approach from what is often termed ‘the Greg-Bowers’ method (named for W. W. Greg and the American scholar Fredson Bowers, who was ‘the main exponent of Greg’s editorial principles throughout the second half of the twentieth century’);14 Owens explains that in editing Defoe, he faced some of the same issues that Pettit describes in editing Haywood’s ‘terrible texts’, where there are few if any marked manuscripts and many hastily compiled printed editions: Although he was a prolific writer, very few of his manuscripts have survived. Those that do survive are full of idiosyncratic abbreviations and contractions, the work of someone writing at speed. Furthermore, Defoe very seldom revised his works or took much interest in them after the first edition. Many of them appeared as cheaply produced pamphlets, but even book-length works, with only a few exceptions, were poorly printed and full of typographical errors. There is none of the authorial tinkering and revision and correcting of the press that the Greg-Bowers and McGannian models of literary production assume.15 The issues that Pettit faced when approaching Haywood, and Owens faced when approaching Defoe, include many of the same issues that faced us when editing Manley. Owens distinguishes his approach in editing Defoe from both the traditional Greg-Bowers method and the more recent paradigm suggested by McGann for offering multiple electronic editions of eighteenth-century printed texts. While Owens appreciates the value of these approaches for certain authors, he observes that

Annotating Delarivier Manley  65 It was clear to us that the levels of textual scrutiny and elaborate collation of texts and recording of variant readings required by the Greg-Bowers ­ efoe. But it was approach were simply not appropriate in the case of D equally clear that the assembly of a vast electronic ‘Defoe Archive’ of the McGannian kind would not have been appropriate either, even if we had felt equipped to undertake such a project. This was not simply because of the time it would have taken to edit each of the works of such a prolific writer in the Greg-Bowers way, or because of the expense involved in digitising and placing on the web multiple copies of the often frequently reprinted works by Defoe. It was more that neither method would have worked as a way of dealing with a situation where the textual history of this author’s works was for the most part a succession of inconsequential variant readings of no textual authority.16 In their general editors’ preface to their forty-four volume edition of Defoe’s works, Owens and his colleague, the late P. N. Furbank, explain that while ‘[t]here has never been a complete edition of Defoe and such is the quantity of his writings that it seems unlikely there ever will be’ their aim in their edition ‘is to give as extensive a representation as possible of Defoe’s works in all the literary genres to which he contributed, with the partial exception of his voluminous periodical journalism’.17 In producing this large-scale hardcover print edition of Defoe, Owens and Furbank were not offering a new model for textual editing. They followed a standard intentionalist practice of choosing as c­ opy-text ‘normally the earliest available edition’, and incorporating ‘additions and revisions in later editions published in Defoe’s lifetime and over which there is reason to think he may have had control’.18 This edition of Defoe offers the scholarly community an opportunity to reconsider and recontextualize an eighteenth-century author whose position within the twentieth-century high literary canon was based largely on his work as a novelist, even though ‘this was by no means how his contemporaries regarded him’.19 Owens and Furbank were preparing an edition of an author for whom ‘neither his contemporaries nor his casual reader today had or has anything like a clear picture of his work as a whole’. 20 Thus, although Daniel Defoe is much better known to twenty-first-century readers than Delarivier Manley, as with Manley (and with other non-Parnassian eighteenth-century writers), most readers held an incomplete picture of Defoe’s work. Owens and Furbank, in their edition of Defoe, were attempting to do what we attempted to do in our edition of Manley: provide a picture of the author’s oeuvre across the full range of genres. 21 In this sense, editing Manley’s Selected Works was similar to the task of editing Defoe’s Selected Works, except that in the case of Defoe, as a canonical author, there was much more previous scholarship on his life, his works and his political views.

66  Rachel Carnell There was then a much more developed narrative into which to fit the information about the works that were being edited. Certainly, the new edition of Defoe would prompt scholars to continue to revise that narrative. With Manley, however, scholarly understanding of her life and her political views was in its infancy when we began the task of editing her works.

Annotating Delarivier Manley Because Manley’s scholarship was at such an early stage when we began our edition, the central task of editing these works was annotating her many references to court and society figures and helping readers understand the genres in which she was working, genres that have often been misunderstood by modern readers. In offering an image of Defoe’s ‘work as a whole’, Owens and Furbank categorize the many and varied, but often familiar, genres in which he wrote into the following: ‘Verse’, ‘Histories’, ‘Full-length treatises’, ‘Fantasies and pseudo-biographies’, ‘Religious and family instruction etc’, ‘Periodical’, and ‘Novels’. 22 They then observe that ‘this vast oeuvre is by no means a mere haphazard jumble; on the contrary, Defoe’s outlook was in some ways remarkably coherent. He had a number of favourite theories and principles.’23 Although there is likewise coherence in Manley’s work – both in her development of literary genres, in particular the political secret history and her ­anti-Whig satire – this coherence could not be visible to modern readers accustomed to seeing her through the misleading lens of a writer of works that appeared to twentieth-century readers as poorly organized novels. We needed to produce an edition, therefore, that would allow readers to tease out whatever sort of coherence might exist across Manley’s diverse publications. While Daniel Defoe was in his own time better known as a political pamphleteer, journalist and poet than novelist, his literary reputation was secured for posterity because of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which was already recognized as a significant contribution to the development of the novel by 1810, when Anna Barbauld praised it as demonstrating Defoe’s talent for ‘natural painting’ in her introductory essay to her canon-shaping fifty-­ volume edition, The British Novelists. 24 In the same era, Sir Walter Scott produced an edition of Defoe’s novels (1809–10), and he and several of the Romantic poets found much to praise in Defoe’s imagination and originality.25 Meanwhile, Manley’s The New Atalantis had not been reissued since the 1740s although its title remained somewhat recognizable through Pope’s tongue-in-cheek comments about its popularity in The Rape of the Lock, in a passage referring to it as an ironic measure of lasting fame: ‘Let Wreaths of Triumph now my Temples twine, / […] As long as Atalantis shall be read’. 26

Annotating Delarivier Manley  67 Manley’s The New Atalantis was cited in the early twentieth century most often by writers and editors of the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, who mined her works for information about public figures during the reign of Queen Anne; the work thus became a treasure trove of period gossip rather than something taken seriously as literature. Robinson Crusoe assumed a status of further significance when mentioned by Karl Marx, and its importance to the development of the novel was underscored in 1957 by Ian Watt. Although Watt mentions Manley as well, he describes her as a figure marginal to the history of narrative realism, because of her use of foreign, rather than ‘realistic’, first names; 27 he does not acknowledge the paradox that these unrealistic names in Manley’s secret histories disguise the very real persons being satirized. By the mid-twentieth century, Manley’s reputation had been further diminished following her denigrating mention by Winston Churchill in his biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, as ‘a woman of disreputable character’. 28 When Patricia Köster produced a facsimile edition of several of Manley’s secret histories, she provided valuable information about the figures Manley was satirizing but simultaneously misrepresented the works themselves by titling her collection The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley. 29 By categorizing Manley as ‘novelist’, rather than a writer of secret histories, Köster’s edition guaranteed Manley’s marginality for those twentieth-century readers who judged her work by the standards of eighteenth-century ‘realism’. When viewed as a novelist, she will always be faulted for anecdotal, non-linear plots. Only when we understand her as an inventive writer of political secret histories, plays, pamphlets and periodicals do we recognize her originality as a writer and her important experimentations with genre. Manley was never considered important enough for the sort of attention that twentieth-century literary scholars brought to Defoe. Even as I was beginning to write a political biography of Manley, commissioned as part of a series of political biographies, I was advised by a senior scholar to make it as comprehensive a biography as possible, rather than a more focused purely political biography. As this scholar suggested to me, mine would likely be the first and last biography to be commissioned for her. Thus, I was being assured of her marginal status, even as I was being asked to spend several more years immersed in full-time research on her. And yet, even at that point, the implications for her biography of the works that Ruth Herman and I had annotated were only just starting to emerge. Manley’s work may be divided into certain categories similar to those deployed by Daniel Defoe and other writers of the era: verse, drama, political pamphlets and political secret histories. However, there are other texts, including Letters Writen, The Unknown Ladies Pacquet and The Adventures of Rivella that are less easy to categorize. Do we view them as fictional travelogues, gossip sheets, secret histories or political secret

68  Rachel Carnell histories? We approached these works with the goal of annotating them so that future scholars could begin to untangle her life and works, beginning with the most basic questions about the very genres in which she was writing. Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley Manley’s first published work, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley (1696), provides an ideal example of the difficulty we face in understanding the genres Manley was working in. Although Manley’s name is evident in the title itself, she offers no introductory information directly; ­i nstead an effusive dedicatory letter to her is included, signed by one J. H. (whose identity has not been established definitely), asking her pardon ‘for venturing to make anything of yours publick, without your Leave’. 30 This introduction suggests that they were actual letters written by Manley published without Manley’s knowledge or consent, although this introductory epistle might just as easily be seen as a marketing ploy to attract interest in the letters by suggesting they contain information that Manley herself might want withheld. By the time the work reached twentieth-century audiences, however, this epistle tended to be taken literally rather than viewed as a marketing strategy. The entry for Manley in the original Dictionary of National Biography (1893) mentions her Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley only as a work that appeared in 1696; no description is given of the work or any literary genre assigned to it. When Patricia Köster refers to Letters Writen in her introduction to her facsimile edition of Manley’s ‘novels’, she treats them simply as a packet of letters ‘written to James Hargrave, John Manley, or to some other recipient in 1694’.31 Köster appears to have taken literally the claim in the dedicatory introduction to Letters Writen that they were simply letters written by Manley and published without her consent. In her study of Manley’s political writings, Ruth Herman describes this work as ‘less problematic’ than Manley’s first two comedies, which were published in the same year as Letters Writen, and which, Herman argues, resonate with the fraught matter of ‘abdication’ in the decade after 1688. Herman identifies Letters Writen as a ‘light little epistolary diary […] an entertaining account of a journey from London to Exeter, supposedly published “without [her] Leave” by an admiring friend’. 32 Although the text is certainly light in tone, as I began the task of annotating the work, I began to identify a wealth of allusions, both literary and political, that rendered the work if not ‘problematic’ at least one that raised many more questions about Manley’s evolution as a political satirist than we had suspected before we began the task of editing. In annotating the names and places, I uncovered information that suggested that Letters Writen was probably crafted in order to sell alongside Manley’s first two published plays, printed in the same year.

Annotating Delarivier Manley  69 The flattering dedicatory epistle to these Letters seems intended to spur sales, with its suggestion that the letters might not be considered ‘proper for the Publick’, although there is nothing in the work that would in fact give offence to Manley or to anyone else. Letters Writen contains references to contemporaneous publications, including poems by John Cleveland and Abraham Cowley, a line ascribed to Themistocles, and an unpublished verse imitation of Thyestes by Manley’s friend George Granville. In our general introduction, Ruth Herman and I conclude that ‘the cumulative effect of the varied literary allusions in Manley’s Letters Writen points to her desire of establishing her credentials as a literary figure in 1696’. 33 In attempting to place the genre of the work in its original context, I identified other works from the era that might have influenced Manley’s decision to produce a travel narrative in letters. It seems likely that she was inspired by the popularity of some late seventeenth-century French epistolary fictions, particularly those by Marie-Catherine la Mothe, comtesse d’Aulnoy. Manley refers to d’Aulnoy’s Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady — Travels into Spain (1691) in her Letters Writen. Manley’s inclusion of a letter in the style of the popular French epistolary narrative Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier also indicates the obvious influence of this other work of French literature. In our general introduction, we thus categorize this work and Manley’s The Unknown Lady’s Pacquet of Letters (1707, 1708), as ‘epistolary fictions’, rather than treating them as personal letters that happened to be printed. At the time that I was annotating Letters Writen, I did not feel that the text demonstrated a strongly partisan political position. Nevertheless, given Manley’s subsequent political writings, it seemed important to gloss thoroughly any references to contemporary political figures and events. I therefore identified the epigraph as having been cited from her friend George Granville, Baron Lansdowne’s then unpublished ‘Imitation’ of Seneca’s Thyestes, a verse that reflects on a politician’s retreat to the country to avoid ‘Factions’, ‘Wars’ and ‘Crowns usurp’d’. 34 I also explained in the footnote that Lansdowne was so staunch a Tory that, he ‘stayed out of politics during William and Mary’s reign’, standing for election to Parliament only after Anne’s accession in 1702. 35 Manley’s likening her own journey to the West of England (probably motivated by personal exigencies) to Lansdowne’s poetic allusion to a political retreat is fascinating. Although as editor I offered no specific political interpretation of her allusion to Lansdowne, it seemed important to acknowledge the potential political import of this allusion to readers. Similarly, in annotating her mention of Thomas Tollemache, who had recently died and whose body was being transported for his funeral during the time of her journey to Exeter, I felt it important to mention the details of his being a Whig war hero, whose credentials had been somewhat tarnished by his having proceeded with the attack

70  Rachel Carnell on Brest that lead to his death, an attack he apparently had the option to cancel. Had I followed a more conservative approach to annotating (not offering information that might seem to be information merely for information’s sake), I would not have added this detail about Tollemache and may not have given as much detail about Lansdowne. However, it turns out that it was this sort of detail that inspired another scholar to offer a new political interpretation of Letters Writen. For Chris Mounsey, Manley’s reference to Tollemache helps position the work, along with Manley’s first two comedies, as a piece of anti-Williamite propaganda in the year that Queen Mary died (Mary, after all, had a better claim to the throne, as James II’s eldest child, than William, James’s nephew). In Manley’s deft references to the local gentry and politicians in the towns she passes on her journey, Mounsey detects hints of the style of Varronian satire that Manley would develop in her full-length political secret histories, and the theory of which she would explain in her dedicatory preface to the second volume of The New Atalantis.36 Mounsey’s recent interpretation of Letters Writen links it more directly to Manley’s next epistolary piece, The Unknown Lady’s Pacquet (1707), which touches on intrigues of court and society figures. Although it is not as directly satirical as The New Atalantis, which appeared one year after the second part of the Lady’s Pacquet, Manley’s pointed references to Richard Steele, the Duchess of Cleveland and other court and society figures, suggest that Manley was already honing her skills as a political secret historian. After annotating the details of the persons she refers to, I felt that it was important to suggest that this work again was not merely a packet of personal letters but demonstrated some characteristics of epistolary political secret history. As we explain in our general introduction, ‘Whether or not we interpret The Unknown Lady’s Pacquet itself as a work of political satire, it definitely establishes Manley as possessing the skills she will need as an effective satirist’. 37 Careful annotating of both of these works also brought to light Manley’s numerous allusions not only to court and society figures but to a range of literary works, both ancient and modern. Thorough annotation thus is crucial to understanding both the origins of Manley’s political satire and the style of Manley’s writing, which, already in the mid-1690s, demonstrated a flair for literary allusion not evident in a work long ascribed to her, the 1705 Queen Zarah and the Zarazians.

De-attributing Queen Zarah and the Zarazians When the initial contract for Manley’s Selected Works was negotiated in 2001, the table of contents naturally included Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, a work long attributed to Manley. While Patricia Köster had acknowledged some problems with the attribution in the introduction

Annotating Delarivier Manley  71 to the facsimile edition of Manley’s ‘novels’, Köster’s facsimile edition did not substantially change the standard view of Manley as a marginal novelist. 38 Ruth Herman’s important repositioning of Manley in The Business of a Woman in 2003 changed our view of Manley from that of a marginal novelist to that of an influential party political writer. However, viewing her in this light served to reinforce the attribution of Manley’s authorship of Queen Zarah, which, for Herman, is Manley’s ‘first known excursion into overt political satire’. 39 This assertion, however, was made before we had completed the annotations of Manley’s Letters Writen and Lady’s Pacquet, annotations that demonstrated that there were more stylistic links between these works than between either of these texts and Queen Zarah. This work, and its chronological placement – written after Manley’s first two plays but between her first and second epistolary satires – has always complicated our understanding of Manley’s evolution as a writer, since it has fewer literary allusions, less developed characters and a less inventive narrative frame than her other epistolary works or her subsequent political secret histories. In 2004, while we were finishing our edition of Manley’s Selected Works, J. A. Downie was simultaneously investigating the paper trail that had led to the original eighteenth-century claim that Manley was the author of Queen Zarah. He followed another trail of evidence that eventually led him to conclude that Joseph Browne in fact was most likely the author of this work.40 Downie shared this information with us before our Selected Works went to press; however, as compelling as this new scholarship on Queen Zarah was, we felt that scholarly debate about the authorship of Zarah would be best served by producing a carefully annotated edition of the work in which we acknowledged the new research about its authorship. We suggested in our introduction that ‘A full assessment of the stylistic richness of Manley’s epistolary prose writing from 1696 to 1708 thus may help to forward the debate over the authorship of Queen Zarah’.41 I thus continued annotating the text, offering as much detail as possible about it. When I began, it was well known that the preface had been lifted, almost verbatim, from a work by the French critic and moralist l’abbé Morvan de Bellegarde, Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale (1702).42 We also knew that certain other passages had been adapted from Sébastien de Brémond’s Hattigé: ou, Les Amours du Roy de Tamaran (1676).43 Had we decided to drop Zarah from the edition, I would never have examined in detail another passage in volume two of Queen Zarah that stylistically did not seem to match the rest of the text. In annotating it, I traced this passage to another work by Bellegarde, his essay ‘Sur le bon Goût’.44 Portions of this essay are simply incorporated in English, without attribution, into Queen Zarah, as a clunky digression. By contrast, Manley’s other works, while anecdotal and

72  Rachel Carnell stylistically digressive, do not generally include this sort of large-scale unattributed borrowing from other authors; rather, she often includes briefer literary citations and allusions that demonstrate her erudition and wide reading. Paradoxically, the process of annotating Queen Zarah helped persuade me, by the time that our edition was going to press, that the work probably was not written by Manley; my co-editor and I were (and remain) in disagreement about this matter. The overall effect of annotating the first three non-dramatic works in volume one of our ­Selected Works – Letters Writen, Queen Zarah and The Unknown Lady’s ­Pacquet – was to change the way I thought about Manley’s use of genre. The literary and political allusions in these early anecdotal epistolary publications offer direct links to the style of her subsequent political secret histories, The New Atalantis and Memoirs of Europe. Secret histories, rather than being structured as linear narratives, are organized as a sequence of anecdotes; this style of anecdotal ‘little history’, inspired by late-seventeenth-century translations of Procopius’s Anekdota, were usually written to contradict the dominant narratives of standard works of history.45 When Manley’s works are viewed through the historically appropriate category of secret history, her oeuvre takes on unexpected coherence; her earlier epistolary works are more legible when viewed as sequences of anecdotes that demonstrate Manley’s burgeoning skills as a secret historian.46 Even Manley’s Adventures of Rivella, which functions as a (quasi-­ fictional) autobiography, also partakes of the genre of secret history, by its use of keys and through the way it is marketed to readers on its title page. Identifying the possible political resonance of characters, including the narrator (identified in the keys as the recently deceased Whig military officer John Tidcomb), allowed me to conclude subsequently that the work could easily have been read by Manley’s contemporaries as a secret history. Moreover, this ‘secret history’ of ‘Rivella’ might have been read by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, as a form of blackmail, and one that resulted in his payment to Manley shortly thereafter of £50.47 Although we did not begin our task of editing by anticipating any particular coherence amongst Manley’s miscellaneous works, our annotations uncovered stylistic and allusive patterns across her oeuvre that underscore her talent as a satirical and inventive writer, whose literary development may best be understood within the genres of her own era.48 Her admiring narrator reminds his readers at the end Rivella of her ‘sparkling Wit and easy Gaiety’ in the company of ‘Persons of Conversation and Humour’.49 Only after having edited and annotated her works did we fully come to understand the extent to which Manley was, as she viewed herself, a wit sparring with the wits of her day, as she challenged and reinvented conventions of gender and genre.

Annotating Delarivier Manley  73

Notes 1 Two of Manley’s plays appeared in the first volume of Eighteenth-­ Century Women Playwrights, General Editor, D. Hughes, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001). 2 Research for this essay was supported by a 2015 Faculty Scholarship Initiative Grant from Cleveland State University. 3 A. Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts, “Marginal” Works, and the Mandate of the Moment: The Case of Eliza Haywood’, TSWL, 22:2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 293–314, on p. 293. 4 Ibid., p. 293. 5 See W. W. Greg, ‘The Rationale of the Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950– 51), pp. 19–37, and J. J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 122–3. 6 Pettit, ‘Terrible Texts’, p. 296. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 294. 9 Ibid., p. 295. 10 Ibid., p. 299. 11 Ibid. 12 R. Carnell, Textual Introduction, The New Atalantis, in R. Carnell and R. Herman (eds), The Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, 5 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 1–2, on p. 1. 13 W. R. Owens, ‘Editing Defoe: Some Reflections on Theory and Practice’, talk given at Aix-Marseille University, 2 December 2013, Britaix Research Seminar 17–18: Editing and Translating Early-Modern Texts: New Directions in the Digital Age. http://f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/2007/ files/2014/06/Texte-Owen.pdf (accessed 25 August 2015), pp. 6–7. I am grateful to Bob Owens for sharing the typescript for this talk (which I did not attend) with me, and for reading and offering feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. 14 Owens, ‘Editing Defoe’, pp. 4–5. 15 Ibid., p. 7. 16 Ibid. 17 W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, General Editors’ Preface, in W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (eds), The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 10 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), vol. 1, pp. 1–4, on p. 1. 18 Owens and Furbank, General Editors’ Preface, p. 3. 19 Ibid., p. 2. 20 Ibid. 21 For the purposes of full disclosure, W. R. Owens was the consulting editor for our Selected Works of Delarivier Manley. 22 Owens and Furbank, General Editors’ Preface, pp. 2–3. 23 Ibid., p. 3. 24 A. Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, in W. McCarthy and E. Kraft (eds), Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 377–416, on p. 401. 25 P. Rogers, Robinson Crusoe (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), pp. 142–3. 26 A. Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and Other Poems, ed. G. Tillotson (London: Methuen; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 180–1, III, lines 161, 165.

74  Rachel Carnell 27 I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 19. 28 W. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 2 vols (London: George G. Harrap, 1947), vol. 1, p. 53. 29 The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, ed. P. Köster, 2 vols (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971). 30 Manley, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 269, n. 5. Some possible identities for J. H. include John Hargreaves or John Hughes. 31 P. Köster, ‘Introduction’, in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, pp. v–xxviii, on p. ix. 32 R. Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), p. 12. 33 Carnell and Herman, General Introduction, in Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 1–41, on p. 12. 34 Manley, Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 59, 270, n. 9. 35 Ibid. 36 C. Mounsey, ‘A Manifesto for a Woman Writer: Letters Writen as Varronian Satire’, in A. Hultquist and E. Mathews (eds), New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 171–87. I am grateful to Chris Mounsey for sharing this essay in advance of its publication. 37 Carnell and Herman, General Introduction, in Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 14. 38 Köster, Introduction, in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, pp. x–xi. 39 Herman, The Business of a Woman, p. 12. 40 J. A. Downie, ‘What if Manley did Not Write The Secret History of Queen Zarah’, The Library, 7th series, 5:3 (September 2004), pp. 247–64. 41 Carnell and Herman, General Introduction, in Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 19. 42 Bellegarde himself borrows ideas from the sieur du Plaisir’s Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire (1683). See L. Sutton, ‘The Sources of Mrs. Manley’s Preface to Queen Zarah’, Modern Philology, 82 (1984), pp. 167–72; and F. Deloffre, La Nouvelle en France à l’âge classique (Paris: Didier, 1967), p. 57; P. Hourcade (ed.), Introduction, in Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire avec des scrupules sur le style (Geneva: Droz, 1975), pp. 1–12. 43 R. Herman, ‘Similarities between Delarivier Manley’s Secret History of Queen Zarah and the English Translation of Hattigé’, Notes and Queries, 47:2 (June 2000), pp. 193–6. 4 4 R. Carnell, ‘More Borrowing from Bellegarde in Manley’s Queen Zarah and the Zarazians’, Notes and Queries, 51:4 (December 2004), pp. 377–9. 45 See A. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 183–98, and R. Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), pp. 29–33. 46 For a discussion of the interrelationship and interlocked development of novels and secret histories in late-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth-century England, see my ‘Slipping from Secret History to Novel’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 28:1 (Fall 2015), pp. 1–24. 47 See my ‘The Adventures of Rivella as Political Secret History’, in New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley, pp. 15–29. 48 Paradoxically, our efforts to make Manley legible to modern readers occurred at a time when library budgets are under such strain that many

Annotating Delarivier Manley  75 university libraries have not been able to purchase our annotated edition. Many active Manley scholars have no access to our edition, as Elizabeth Mathews and Aleksondra Hultquist observe in their introduction to New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature, pp. 1–12, on p. 5. I am grateful to them for sharing their introduction with me in advance of publication. 49 Manley, Selected Works, vol. 4, p. 57.

6 Julie and Julia Tracing intertextuality in Helen Maria Williams’s novel Natasha Duquette

The allusions and quotations embedded in Helen Maria Williams’s Julia, a novel interspersed with poetical pieces (1790) display a depth and breadth of literary knowledge. While closely attending to Williams’s narrative, in the process of editing her novel for the Chawton House Library Series, I discovered layers of intertextuality I had not previously noticed. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argues, ‘masterpieces are not single and solitary births’,1 and Julia was certainly not a solitary birth but arose out of Williams’s extensive reading and cultural experiences. My approach to Julia as an editor was informed by Woolf’s emphasis on intellectual communities as textually generative and also by Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’, a term which initially appeared in her essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1966). Kristeva defines ‘intertextuality’ as the dynamic and relational interweaving of multiple voices, through allusions as well as direct quotations, into a print narrative. As female literary theorists, both Woolf and Kristeva see novels emerging from dialogic interpersonal encounters with other writers, whose traces are left embedded in the published text. While working through the first edition of Williams’s novel, I combed her prose in search of references to other pieces of literature. I found she undergirded her story with multiple allusions to the Bible, especially Hebrew scripture, 2 as well as to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), reflecting her Dissenting Presbyterian background. As a supporter of the French Revolution, she also clearly responds to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Such connections were relatively easy to catch. However, other quotations and allusions were at times quite difficult to unpack as a twenty-first century editor, and these esoteric references led me to much lesser-known sources, such as Presbyterian minister John Home’s play Douglas: A Tragedy (1757), which proved key to understanding Williams’s novel and her self-awareness as a Dissenting woman writer. In this essay, I will focus primarily on Williams’s intertextual connections to mid-eighteenth-century texts, first editions of which I was reading at the Huntington Library’s Ahmanson Rare Books Room in San Marino, California, while editing Williams’s prose to create the only

Julie and Julia  77 annotated edition of Julia to date, complete with a bio-critical introduction and explanatory endnotes outlining Williams’s cultural, political, social and literary contexts. Her text reflects a complex network of ideas arising from both her solitary reading practices and her sociable experiences with groups such as the Bluestockings. The process of editing Julia, and reading original eighteenth-century printings of the texts with which Williams engages, helped me understand the rootedness of her narrative in a specific, contingent, cultural geography. Writing the endnotes was an experience of carefully surveying and mapping the intricacies and topographical features, including local nuances, of Williams’s literary landscape. As an editor, I was keen to situate Julia in a particular time and space, which for Williams had consisted of a liminal threshold or suspended hybridity between her Scottish and Welsh familial background, her formative years as a young female writer in 1780s London, and her adult attraction to cosmopolitan revolutionary Paris. In Julia, written shortly before her move to Paris, Williams’s literary and artistic engagement is traceable through London’s Bluestocking intellectual circles and Drury Lane theatrical activities, back to her Welsh and Scottish background, even as she looks forward to France. Julia’s narrative structure is hence heterogeneous and variegated, with multiple threads of literary allusions and direct quotations interwoven with artful skill into its prose and poetry. Williams responds to a wide variety of poems, and plays, as well as fictional and non-fiction prose by German, English, Irish, French, Welsh and Scottish writers. Williams enters eighteenth-century aesthetic debates on obscurity, sublimity and transcendence by referencing Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear (1769) and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757; second edition 1759), for example, as well as Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757). She takes her readers through the vertigo of Burkean terror towards the calm of Rousseauian serenity and the dauntlessness of feminine fortitude before concluding with a picture of sustaining female community in shared contemplative sublimity. Through her own Julia, Williams considers then dispels obscurity as an appealing aesthetic category, and as an editor I was able to follow this process by illuminating her more obscure intertextual references to reveal their gestures towards powerful female embodiments of the sublime. Williams’s heroine Julia is first and foremost a poet, like her creator, and the verse Williams intersperses throughout her novel, especially the richly intertextual literary manifesto, ‘An Address to Poetry’, presents a delightful challenge to the modern editor. Having drafted the bio-critical introduction to my edition of Julia, I was attuned to Williams’s mixed identity as a young woman of Welsh and Scottish background living in London. The editor assumes an autobiographical inflection when Williams’s narrator reflects, ‘perhaps the most precious property of poetry is

78  Natasha Duquette that of leading the mind from the gloomy mists of care, or black clouds of misfortune, which sometimes gather round the path of life, to scenes bright with sunshine’.3 These bright scenes may symbolize Williams’s own early youth in Berwick-upon-Tweed, near the border of Scotland, before her later move to London with her widowed mother and sister. The speaker of Julia’s ‘Address to Poetry’ flees from false, aristocratic, urbane community to a contemplative sublime of feminine communion close to nature. She turns from the press of ‘the idle crowd in fashion’s train’4 to poetry, defined enthusiastically as ‘the flash of light, by souls refined, / From heaven’s empyreal source exulting caught’. 5 Here, with knowledge of Williams’s biography, the editor imagines Williams herself turning away from London, in her imagination, towards the ‘bright scenes’ of a poetry and scripture-infused childhood in the North. As an editor, I saw Julia’s ‘Address to Poetry’ both as a utopian vision of the healing powers of poetry and memory and as a meta-literary work of poetic theory in verse. Within her ‘Address’ Williams deploys the poetic voice of her character Julia to analyse works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray, and she also pays tribute to Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu’s own literary criticism. These dynamic intertextual connections were exciting to unpack and annotate for readers. Within Julia’s ‘Address to Poetry’, Williams practices a form of proto-­ feminist Shakespearean criticism, following Montagu, whose textual analysis she admired.6 When Julia questions whether she should ‘wander where those hags of night / With deeds unnamed shall freeze my trembling soul?’,7 she alludes to Montagu’s discussion of Macbeth’s ‘midnight hags’8 in terms that parallel Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime. These references prompted me to create endnotes explaining the importance of aesthetic discourse in Williams’s time, to which Williams was both responding and contributing. For Elizabeth Montagu, the witches’ phrase ‘deed without a name’ when set in ‘their allotted region of solitude and night’ 9 inspires an ‘unlimited terror’10 akin to the Burkean sublime. Philosopher James Beattie agrees with his patroness Montagu in his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), remarking, ‘“A deed without a name”. One’s blood runs cold at the thought, that their work could be of so accursed a nature, that they themselves had no name to express it by, or were afraid to speak of it by name […] here is the true sublime.’11 Beattie respectfully acknowledges Montagu’s influence when he writes of Macbeth, ‘See its merits examined and explained, with the utmost correctness of judgment, beauty of language, and vivacity of imagination, in Mrs. Montagu’s Essay’.12 As an editor, I desired to excavate and reveal Williams’s multi-layered literary allusions for readers. Documenting her references to Shakespeare made me realize how she juxtaposes three Shakespearean heroines from

Julie and Julia  79 three different nations – England, Italy and Denmark – and in doing so reflects her own ideal of women’s transnational community. Williams breaks from both Montagu and Beattie through Julia’s movement past fear into images of sympathetic, sorrowful and virtuous female community. She first addresses and then dismisses Macbeth’s witches: Plunge me foul sisters! In the gloom Ye wrap around yon blasted heath, To hear the harrowing rite I come, That calls the angry shades from death! – Away—my frighted bosom spare! Let true Cordelia pour her filial sigh, Let Desdemona lift her pleading eye, And poor Ophelia sing in wild despair!13 Julia evokes gothic aspects of the Burkean sublime in her use of the words ‘gloom’, ‘death’, and ‘frighted’, but she does not ultimately find what she terms ‘deeds unnamed’14 a lasting source of sublimity. Instead, she chooses compassionate identification with the pathos of Desdemona, Cordelia and Ophelia. Ultimately, Williams draws her reader’s attention away from the misogynist (and anti-Scottish) image of ‘foul sisters’ and focuses instead on the steadfast filial love, innocent martyrdom and chorally-expressive lament of Shakespeare’s constant heroines. Williams lifts each woman out of her respective play’s national context and places her side-by-side in an imagined feminine and transnational community. As an editor, I was thinking about the date of publication for Williams’s novel – 1790 – and how it reflects Julia’s proximity to the French Revolution and women’s salon culture in Paris, to which Williams would eventually contribute by hosting female philosophers, such as Madame de Staël and Mary Wollstonecraft, once she had settled in France. In Julia’s ‘Address’ the gathering together of heroines leads to a pouring forth of generative light from the fount of Poesy into the landscape. Poesy takes on the soothing characteristics that Williams associates with women’s friendship: Blest Poesy! Oh sent to calm The human pains which all must feel; Still shed on life thy precious balm, And every wound of nature heal!15 Williams depicts Poesy as a female friend who is found in the margins, amidst the hiddenness of lowly paths and recesses of hanging rocks, just as a literary network of intertextual tributes and allusions lies embedded within the apparently digressive poetic side paths of her narrative. As an editor, in unearthing these connections, and writing explanatory

80  Natasha Duquette endnotes for each, I found these side trails are actually integral to the structure and meaning of Julia as a whole. The more I scanned for trailheads and explored where they led, the more intertextual connections I found; they proliferated, one leading to another in an abundance of hidden cultural history. In ‘An Address’ Williams invokes an image of abundant poetic generativity: Wild Poesy, in haunts sublime, Delights her lofty note to pour; She loves the hanging rock to climb, And hear the sweeping torrent roar:16 These lines depict an infusion of feminine consciousness and song into the landscape, in a creative outpouring, which is absent from Burke’s construction of sublimity in terms of a distanced terror rooted in self-preservation.17 Williams’s Poesy is vulnerable as she delights in pouring forth her compositions above the roaring water; she is focused not on self-preservation but shared self-expression in harmony with the sounds of the natural environment. Through the process of discovering and examining Williams’s multiple and rich references to poets and playwrights, I realized she had chosen, arranged and planted them in her novel’s textual landscape with care, and at times with a sense of Celtic identity and love of wilderness. In his introduction to the Woodstock edition of Williams’s 1786 Poems, Jonathan Wordsworth states, ‘One reads the pronoun “she” as referring as much to the writer as to “Wild Poesy,” but by the time Julia was published Williams was in Paris, and too caught up in politics to be writing poetry of the natural sublime’.18 In fact, throughout the 1790s Williams continued to conceive new forms for the natural sublime, in the midst of her Dissenting political commitment to democracy, as a moderate Girondist living on the continent during the French Revolution. Williams’s increasingly transnational interest in the construction of sublime poetic landscapes is evidenced throughout her later lyric poetry. While she was imprisoned by Maximilien Robespierre, for example, Williams translated Bernardin Saint Pierre’s pastoral novel set in Mauritius, Paul et Virginie (1787) as Paul and Virginia (1795). Williams inserted original sonnets within her translation, celebrating tropical sublimity, including a tribute to the Indian Ocean’s ‘sublimer day’.19 In her Tour in Switzerland, or a view of the present state of the governments and manners of those cantons: With comparative sketches of the present state of Paris (1798) she combines vast wilderness imagery with natural theology via ‘A Hymn Written in the Alps’. 20 In Julia Williams began a pattern of setting poetic contemplations of sublime landscapes within socially conscious and philosophical prose, which would extend through the 1790s. While editing her work and contemplating her intertextual references,

Julie and Julia  81 I came to see she was not doing so in isolation but consciously building upon eighteenth-century Welsh and Scottish combinations of bardic aesthetics, poetics and political commentary. It is the editor’s responsibility to establish such autobiographical links in order to form a bridge between her biographical introduction to a work by an eighteenth-century woman writer and the endnotes she adds to her text. In Williams’s novel, after Julia introduces ‘Wild Poesy’ into her ‘Address’, she expresses a desire to attain the mountain top stance of Thomas Gray’s Celtic bard, in particular. Jacqueline Labbe persuasively ties the heights of the prospect position to ‘the masculine world of active power’ in Romantic-era poetry. 21 In pre-Romantic poems, such as Gray’s ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ (1757), a Celtic seer could also deploy the depth of vision provided from a prospect to protest political oppression. As the daughter of a Welsh father and Scottish mother, Williams would have been exposed to the cultural figure of the incensed bard, voicing the grievances of an oppressed group. (Such a figure is revised with transnational inflections through her character Zamor, the indigenous bard in her 1784 epyllion Peru). For Williams, the idea of a dauntless poet declaring words of truth to power would have had familial, as well as biblical, associations. Jon Mee convincingly illustrates how Williams’s poem ‘To Dr. Moore, in answer to a Poetical Epistle written by him in Wales’ (1792) voices admiration for ‘the wildness associated with the Welsh sublime’. 22 That the connection to Welsh sublimity also inflects Williams’s earlier poetry is especially evident in Julia’s ardent petition to join Welsh bardic resistance. Her cultural connection to the figure of the Celtic bard was an aspect of her life experience I sought to highlight more generally in the bio-critical introduction I wrote for Julia, as well as in the endnotes I wrote for ‘An Address to Poetry’ in particular. In ‘The Bard’, Gray’s speaker directly references Welsh geography, specifically the Conwy, a river in North Wales that flows into the ocean: On a rock, whose haughty brow Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood, Rob’d in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the poet stood; (Loose his beard, and hoary hair Stream’d, like a meteor, to the troubled air) And with a master’s hand, and prophet’s fire, Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre; ‘Hark, how each giant-oak, and desert cave, Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath!’23 Gray depicts his Welsh bard in robes of mourning, crying out in national grief and righteous anger. In a prefatory note, Gray explains: ‘The following Ode is founded on a Tradition current in Wales, that Edward

82  Natasha Duquette the First, when he compleated [sic] the conquest of that country, ordered all the Bards, that fell into his hands, to be put to death’. 24 The English King Edward was brutal in his subduing of the Scottish as well, which earned him the title ‘Hammer of the Scots’. The Welsh/Scottish poet, Helen Maria Williams shares the ire of Gray’s bard and voices it through her heroine Julia, illustrating how Williams was thinking politically about issues of social injustice before her move to France. Julia petitions Poesy to let her ascend a prospect, so she too may protest against tyranny. She exclaims: Let me o’er old Conway’s flood Hang on the frowning rock, and trace The characters, that wove in blood, Stamped the dire fate of Edward’s race; Proud tyrant, tear thy laurelled plume; How poor thy vain pretense to deathless fame! The injured muse records thy lasting shame, And she has power to ‘ratify thy doom’. 25 Williams lifts the ominous phrase ‘ratify thy doom’ directly from line 96 of ‘The Bard’, and it functions as a call for justice in both poems. The speaker of Julia’s ‘Address’ is full of justified Welsh indignation as she critiques the ‘proud tyrant’ Edward. In her fascinating study of women’s prophetic discourse, Orianne Smith suggests Julia ‘prays’ for poetic strength yet is restricted to the personal sphere in her ‘Address’.26 Smith’s reading of Julia’s poem is a good start, but Smith does not note the connection between political prophecy and bardic discourse already present in Williams’s direct quotation from Gray’s poem. My work as an editor examining levels of intertextuality, and tracing quotations back to their original sources, led to my encounter with Gray’s poem, which links religious interest in prophetic biblical discourse to a Celtic political embodiment of the poet-prophet. Williams’s Welsh familial background suggests intentionality behind her choosing and ordering of literary references in order to construct her own definition of political poetry through textual bricolage. Julia’s intertextual alliance with the Welsh bard of Gray’s poem participates in the public, prophetic and political, but with key gendered differences. Whereas Gray depicts justice flowing through a male bard and his band of ghostly ‘brothers’, 27 Williams grants a female figure, ‘the injured muse’, authority to record atrocities and dispense justice. At the conclusion of Gray’s ode, his bard envisions a future when poetry will rekindle cultural generativity after the return of just rule. After voicing this prophecy, he falls from his prospect: ‘He spoke, and headlong from the mountain’s height / Deep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night.’28 As an editor, after pausing to read Gray’s poem in the Huntington Rare Books Room, and then returning to Williams’s novel, I saw how

Julie and Julia  83 Williams clearly evades this suicidal plunge in Julia’s ‘Address’. Immediately after the quotation from Gray, Julia’s sense of justice is tempered and strengthened through reconnection to her source of poetic sustenance: Nature, when first she smiling came, To wake within the human breast The sacred muses’ hallowed flame, And earth, with heaven’s rich spirit blest! Nature in that auspicious hour, With awful mandate bade the bard The register of glory guard, And gave him o’er all mortal honours power. 29 Julia now represents the ‘sacred muses’ as members of a female community who bless the ‘earth’ with their ‘hallowed flame’. Williams’s friend and supporter Joanna Baillie picked up on this fiery imagery in her own ‘Address to the Muses’ (1790), wherein she praises ‘sisters of the lyre’ who ‘kindle with your sacred fire’. 30 Williams’s muses likewise spark creativity as a gift connecting earth and heaven. They also confer a potentially harrowing responsibility on the poet-prophet to expose the truth. Williams follows the biblical portrayal of prophets as not only foreseers of the future but also testifiers to injustices of the past and present, as is the case with the prophet Isaiah, whose Hebraic verse she paraphrases and exegetes in her two-volume collection Poems (1786).31 For her, there is something awful, or sublime, in the act of writing poetry that seeks justice. Through Julia’s idea of the bard’s mandate to maintain honour in historical records, Williams also alludes to her earlier poem ‘An Irregular Fragment’ (1786), within which she records the injustices that have occurred within the Tower of London. Deborah Kennedy rightly sees Williams deploying gothic obscurity in her ‘Fragment’ to critique arbitrary rule and emphasize the ‘real horrors’ of ‘British history’.32 The intertextual patterns in Julia include self-­reflexive references to Williams’s own oeuvre. The work of examining and mapping these patterns prompts the editor to consider the achievement of nuanced self-­ reflexivity as the result of Williams’s developing literary career through the 1780s, leading up to the publication of her novel in 1790. While creating the edition of Julia I was becoming increasingly aware of how the theme of poetic prophecy is woven throughout Williams’s early writing, including her anti-slavery ‘Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade’ (1788). In Julia, poetic exposure of political oppression occurs again near the novel’s end, through a lyric attempting to give voice to those held within the ancien régime’s infamous prison, the Bastille. A character simply named Mr. F – reads a poem to Julia written by a friend of his

84  Natasha Duquette imprisoned for ‘some supposed offense against the state’.33 In ‘The Bastille: A Vision’, an ‘awful form’ tells him, A deed was done in this black cell Unfit for mortal ear A deed was done when toll’d that knell, No human heart could live and hear!34 Williams revisits Macbeth’s phrase ‘deed without a name’ with a political twist. Orianne Smith intriguingly claims it is here, in ‘The Bastille: A Vision’, that Williams first assumes ‘the mantle of the female prophet’.35 Williams does indeed explicitly join poetic prophecy to political justice in this poem,36 but in doing so she builds upon similar more subtle prophetic moves hidden within the dense intertextuality of her ‘Address to Poetry’, including her references to Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ which it took the careful work of an editor to discern and elucidate. Williams’s denouncement of French tyranny in ‘The Bastille: A Vision’, the final poem of Julia, arises from her ardent critique of Edward I’s despotism via Thomas Gray’s imagery within Julia’s first poem, the ‘Address’. In both poems, a poet’s testimony to oppression is met with consolation. In ‘Address’, grace and light pour forth from the ‘fount’ of poetry, and in ‘Bastille’, hope arises from philosophical discourse: ‘Philosophy! Oh, share the meed / Of Freedom’s noblest deed!’37 Through this move from poetry to philosophy, Williams re-emphasizes Julia’s central intertext: French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie. As an editor, I felt responsible for providing readers with an overview of previous critical responses to the relationship between Julie and Julia both in my bio-critical introduction and in the annotations of Williams’s novel. In the notes, I briefly listed critical assessments of this relationship by Peter Garside, Jacqueline LeBlanc and Janet Todd. My own interpretation comes closest to Todd’s, as she highlights Williams’s feminist and revisionist rewriting of Rousseau’s narrative. One of my endnotes, in particular, builds on Todd’s work by analysing the character Frederick Seymour’s embodiment of Rousseau’s opinions and Julia Clifford’s stoic silence in resistance to these views. Williams’s Dissenting Presbyterian background no doubt caused her to also approach Rousseau’s utopian views with a degree of sceptical resistance, and she both draws on and modifies his philosophy, as well as his narrative structure in Julie. Williams articulates her ongoing respect for Rousseauian aesthetics in her Tour in Switzerland (1798), where she evokes alpine ‘repose’ as a ‘state of soothing happiness Rousseau has described with his usual eloquence in a letter to Julie’.38 During his travels, Julie’s tutor Saint-Preux writes to her of: les haughtes montagnes, où l’air est pur et subtil, on se sent plus de facilité dans la respiration, plus de légèreté dans le corps, plus de

Julie and Julia  85 sérénité dans l’esprit; les plaisirs y sont moins ardens, les passions plus modérés. Les méditations y prennent je ne sais quelle caractère grand et sublime, proportionné aux objets qui nous frappent, je ne sais quelle volupté tranquille qui n’a rien d’âcre et de sensuel.39 Williams translates: in the higher mountains, where the air is pure and subtile [sic], is a greater easiness of breathing, more lightness in the body, and more serenity in the mind. – Meditation assumes, in those regions, something of a character great, and sublime, proportioned to the objects which strike us; something of tranquil rapture, remote from all that is selfish, or sensual.40 Williams’s translation draws Rousseau into the discourse of British dissent via her rendering of Rousseau’s ‘d’âcre’ as ‘selfish’. She shows affinity with her mentor Anna Barbauld who argued in ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste’ (1775) that psalmic sublimity lifts the affections above ‘everything […] selfish’.41 Fiona Price asserts that Barbauld’s 1775 essay ‘develops alternative models of the sublime that are of great significance in understanding Romantic aesthetics’.42 The same is true of Williams’s Julia. Williams combines the tranquillity of Rousseau’s alpine meditations with the Dissenting sublime’s emphasis on a rise above narrow self-focus into social consciousness. In Williams’s novel, Julia climbs the tower of a ruined convent and then pauses to look out from its height. She sympathizes imaginatively with the nuns who once lived in the building, reflecting: ‘Peace, the sacred sister of the cell!’ This vast expanse of water, the distant sound of that falling torrent, and those lofty mountains that arrest the clouds in their progress, must have inspired a frame of mind, in which the concerns of the world are considered in all their littleness, and have no power to affect our tranquillity.43 At this moment, Williams grants Julia the prospect position for which she petitioned in her ‘Address’. But, instead of placing Julia on a perilous rock jutting over the Atlantic, Williams’s narrator describes her confidently ascending a symbol of feminine spiritual community and standing firm on its foundation. Julia’s thoughts are not wildly passionate, enthusiastic or raging as she rests on the turret’s height; instead she is calmly contemplative and philosophical as she surveys the landscape. In his novel, Rousseau’s Julie remains within her domestic sphere to passively receive the philosophical musings of her wandering tutor Saint-Preux. Williams’s Julia, on the other hand, is herself the adventurous philosopher, scaling heights and reflecting on vast open spaces. Furthermore,

86  Natasha Duquette whereas Rousseau’s Saint-Preux ponders mountain heights in a mode masculine, solitary and ahistorical, Williams’s Julia engages in an act of feminine sympathetic imagination full of social consciousness and connected to the historical realities of a specific ecclesial community of women. She respects the memory of the contemplative sisters who once inhabited the space in which she finds herself and attempts to view the landscape through the Catholic women’s eyes. Another key difference between Julie and Julia lies in the nature of their endings, and as an editor attending closely to Williams’s narrative, I became acutely aware of changes she made to Rousseau’s narrative. Reading other critics’ analysis of her response to Rousseau, especially Todd’s and Garside’s, and creating a synopsis of that analysis brief enough to fit within the small space allotted to an endnote, helped me take a step back and consider the narrative structure as a whole. In Julie, the silently suffering heroine dies at the conclusion of a narrative detailing her renunciations and self-sacrifice after experiencing a loss in love. In Julia Williams’s heroine is a vocal female bard with a philosophical sense of sublimity and justice who remains alive, and somewhat free, at the novel’s end. Like Rousseau, Williams realistically depicts pangs of self-denial and unrealized desire in a sensitive woman, but Williams keeps her heroine alive and flourishing, in the context of a harmonious female community. Julia feels social injustice keenly and gives voice to her outrage transparently, but her fiery ethical conviction does not burn out in death, like that of Gray’s bard. Rather, it is transmuted into enduring feminine communion. The subtitle of Rousseau’s Julie, ‘la nouvelle Héloïse’, is itself an intertextual reference to the story of a twelfth-­ century Parisian woman, Éloïse, who fell in love with her teacher, the philosopher priest Peter Abelard, had a child with him, and then joined a convent after their secret was exposed. In England, the story was retold in Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717). The historical Éloïse went on to become the abbess of the Oratory of the Paraclete, a Benedictine community of nuns. In Rousseau’s revision of the medieval legend, Julie falls in love with her tutor Saint-Preux, but cannot marry him because of their difference in class. She dutifully marries a friend of her father’s, Wolmar, but later in life she sees Saint-Preux again and realizes she still loves him. Shortly after this realization, she altruistically dives into Lake Geneva to save her son from drowning, falls ill and dies. In Williams’s response to Rousseau, the gendering of the love triangle is reversed. Instead of one woman between two men, as in Rousseau’s narrative, one man is between two women. Near the beginning of Julia, a young man named Frederick proposes to Julia’s cousin Charlotte; he then meets and falls in love with the erudite poetess Julia, but dutifully marries Charlotte to fulfil his promise. Frederick cannot relinquish his desire for Julia, and he dies of a fever at the narrative’s conclusion, taking the place of Rousseau’s Julie

Julie and Julia  87 on her deathbed. After Frederick’s death, Julia and her impoverished friend Mrs Meynell take up residence with Charlotte and her son in the home of Charlotte’s father, thus forming a Dissenting feminine community. At the novel’s end, Julia emerges as the bardic poet-leader of this vulnerable group of women, recollecting the original Héloïse’s eventual position as abbess. Through the fictional Julia’s situation as contemplative leader, within a benevolent female community of three, Williams parallels and affirms the historical Éloïse’s eventual choice to live in spiritual communion with other women. Janet Todd notes how Williams borrows from the plot of Julie but adds ‘a female communal conclusion, very rarely provided by male writers’.44 It is also important to note that in Julia’s Protestant, Dissenting variation on a convent, Williams actually returns the narrative of Rousseau’s Julie back to something closer to its twelfth-century source. The preference for authentic, egalitarian community in a rural setting is where Williams shares more common ground with Rousseau. Peter Garside argues that, in Julia’s ‘The Bastille: A Vision’, ‘for a brief moment Williams appears to anticipate the harmonious human relationships, founded on liberated sympathetic feeling, which she was shortly to celebrate in Letters Written in France’,45 but for Garside, the novel’s ending with Frederick’s death is ultimately ‘repressive’.46 Perhaps Williams’s ending is not repressive but realist and modestly hopeful. The intertextual references exposed via thorough editing and annotation of her novel reveal source texts expressive of human passions, from Shakespeare’s Othello to Gray’s ‘The Bard’, and hardly suggest repression. However, these intertexts also realistically depict the potentially destructive and tragic consequences of such passions, and Williams’s text is able to re-channel them into constructive forms of feminine community. The conclusion of Julia bravely depicts the reality of single women’s lives in the late eighteenth century; single women most likely had to band together to survive economically, as depicted fictionally by Jane Austen in the Highbury home of Mrs and Miss Bates and their visitor Jane Fairfax in Emma or the real, historical situation of Mrs Austen with her two unmarried daughters and their widowed friend Martha Lloyd living together at Chawton Cottage from 1809 to 1817. In Helen Maria Williams’s novel, Julia’s satiric distaste for the aristocratic affectations of London and her willingness to extend sympathetic friendship, and eventually shelter, to the impoverished and disempowered do indeed parallel the revolutionary ideas expressed slightly later in Williams’s Letters Written in France, in the summer of 1790. Another intertext for Julia with parallels to Julie, but with a more vocal female protagonist, is the play Douglas: A Tragedy (1757), written by Presbyterian minister John Home, and based on the Scottish ballad ‘Childe Maurice’. As noted in the introduction to this essay, Douglas is an arguably less well-known text, at least to a general readership

88  Natasha Duquette today. I was not even certain I would be able to access it through the Ahmanson Rare Books Room in Southern California, where I was finishing the endnotes for Julia, so I was delighted to discover the Huntington holds a 1791 printing of Home’s play. Williams’s heroine Julia attends a performance of the tragedy Douglas at Drury Lane. Like Rousseau’s Julie, the plot of Douglas focuses on a woman in a dutiful marriage, Lady Matilda Randolph, who has experienced an early loss in love, this time due to Scottish clan rivalry and the death of her beloved in war. Before she was Lady Randolph, Matilda fell in love with Douglas, the son of her father’s rival, married him secretly, and had a child with him, only to lose Douglas when he fell in battle. Her infant, also named Douglas, was rushed away by a nurse who drowned while trying to cross a river with him. At the beginning of the play, Matilda is unaware that her son is alive. In Act 3, an elderly shepherd tells her: ‘By the moon’s light I saw, whirl’d round / A basket; soon I drew it to the bank, / And nestled curious there an infant lay’,47 in an interesting biblical allusion to Moses. This infant is the young Douglas, Matilda’s son. After the shepherd tells his story, Matilda meets secretly with her son Douglas to let him know she is his mother, but her second husband, Lord Randolph, believes she is having a Romantic tryst and slays the young Douglas in a jealous rage. The play concludes with the grieving mother Lady Randolph’s suicide. Why did Helen Maria Williams choose this particular play for her heroine Julia to attend and enthusiastically approve? Williams’s narrator states: On her arrival in town, Julia expressed a great desire to go to the theatre; and Mrs. Seymour engaged a box at Drury-lane for the next evening, when the tragedy of Douglas was performed. Julia admired with enthusiasm that charming play […] which had not, till some years after this period, its full effect upon the heart, in having the part of Lady Randolph represented by Mrs. Siddons.48 From an editor’s perspective, this short passage demanded multiple endnotes, explaining that Douglas was performed in Edinburgh from 1757, and in Drury Lane from 1758 onwards, with Sarah Siddons playing the lead female role of Lady Matilda Randolph during the 1783–4 season. While writing these notes, I continued to wonder what attracted Williams to Douglas. Was it actress Sarah Siddons’s rendering of the strong female lead? Was it the fact that the playwright John Home was a Scottish Presbyterian, like Williams’s mother, and his play based on a Scottish ballad? Was it Matilda’s pensive and prayerful character, her attraction to contemplative sublimity, and her pacifist convictions, all qualities shared by Williams and her heroine Julia? While finishing the Pickering & Chatto edition of Julia I would occasionally leave the Ahmanson Rare Books Room and walk through the

Julie and Julia  89

Figure 6.1   Joshua Reynolds, ‘Sarah (Kemble) Siddons as the Tragic Muse’ (1783–1784). ©Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

Huntington gardens to a gallery containing a portrait of Sarah Siddons. Joshua Reynolds painted the image while Siddons was performing in Douglas and titled it ‘The Tragic Muse’ (Figure 6.1). Helen Maria Williams admired Siddons from at least the mid-1780s onwards, and she included a sonnet dedicated to the actress in her 1786 Poems. Given its publication date, this sonnet was most likely inspired by Williams’s perceptions of Siddons as Lady Matilda Randolph. Williams declaims: SIDDONS! the Muse, for many a joy refin’d, Feelings which ever seem too swiftly fled – For those delicious tears she loves to shed, Around thy brow the wreath of praise would bind – But can her feeble notes thy praise unfold? Repeat the tones each changing passion gives?

90  Natasha Duquette Or mark where nature in thy action lives, Where, in thy pause, she speaks a pang untold! When fierce ambition steels thy daring breast, When from thy frantic look our glance recedes; Or oh, divine enthusiast! when opprest By anxious love, that eye of softness pleads – The sun-beam all can feel, but who can trace The instant light, and catch the radiant grace!49 Williams’s sonnet to Siddons combines the passionate Petrarchan form’s octave plus sestet with the closing couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet. Williams effectively deploys the break of her sonnet’s volta to recreate the pregnant ‘pause’ of silence on stage used by Siddons to convey a pang unspeakable. She suggests a sublimely ineffable quality in Siddons’s acting, felt momentarily but impossible to capture, even by Williams’s own words. Williams was taking a bold stance by endorsing a highly controversial play; not all reviewers were delighted with Siddons’s performance or the character of Matilda in Douglas. A recent resurgence of interest in Douglas has occurred amongst early twenty-first-century critics, but no one, to date, has considered Williams’s Julia as part of the play’s reception history.50 Eighteenth-century Scottish ministers of influence in the Presbyterian church were deeply scandalized by Douglas for two reasons. First of all, they believed clergymen should not be involved in playwriting, and secondly, they objected to the theological statements voiced by the play’s female lead. The Scottish Presbyterian reviewers were disturbed by what they perceived as Matilda’s questioning of God’s sovereignty, but they must also have been outraged by the idea of a woman speaking what are essentially mini sermons on stage. One reviewer protested against the character of Lady Randolph […] in which are such a number and variety of the most unscriptural principles and practices, such a composition of errors and wickedness, that instead of becoming the favourite of unwary spectators, it is beyond [doubt] she does not fill them with horror and contempt. 51 This reviewer acknowledged the play’s aesthetic merit, but then asserted ‘in proportion to the exactness of the composition, and symmetry of all the parts, I consider it as so much more dangerous and insnaring [sic], like a dunghill covered in snow’.52 When a modern reader encounters Home’s construction of Matilda as a figure of suffering virtue, subject to the paranoid violence of Lord Randolph, it is difficult to see what so enraged these Presbyterian reviewers. Matilda’s first theological reflection is a remarkable expression

Julie and Julia  91 of gratitude upon discovering the preservation of her son’s life by a shepherd. She reflects: Unparalleled event! Reaching from heav’n to earth, Jehovah’s arm Snatch’d from the waves, and brings to me my son! Judge of the widow, and the orphan’s father, Accept a widow’s and a mother’s thanks For such a gift!53 The biblical image of God as ‘father to the fatherless’ (Psalm 68:5), also deployed by Helen Maria Williams in volume two of Julia, in Home’s play reappears via a prayer voiced by Matilda in Act 4: ‘Oh, thou all-righteous and eternal King! Who father of the fatherless art call’d / Protect my son!’54 Finally, after her son has been killed by her second husband Lord Randolph, Matilda simply states: ‘Omnipotence displays itself, / Making a spectacle, a tale of me, / To awe its vessel, man’, presenting herself as a sublime figure of maternal grief.55 Feminist philosopher Bonnie Mann draws a parallel between experiences of one’s own finitude when faced with a vast landscape or a sudden death. She writes: ‘One is confronted by an ocean of loss, a depth of feeling that is overwhelming to any sense of individual control’. 56 Matilda’s intense grief over the loss of her son drives her to ascend a sublime prospect only to plunge to her death. The servant Anna recounts: She ran, she flew like Lightning up the hill, Nor halted till the precipice she gain’d, Beneath whose low’ring top the river falls Ingulph’d in rifted rocks: thither she came, As fearless as the eagle lights upon it, And headlong down –57 Like Thomas Gray, Home depicted an individual driven by violent loss into lament on a wild prospect followed by a fatal fall. Williams represents Julia watching from the audience at Drury Lane, ‘deeply absorbed in the sorrows of Lady Randolph’, and responding with ‘tears’ during the performance.58 Williams was not alone in representing this powerful response to Douglas. David Hume wrote a letter to his friend John Home, stating, the unfeigned Tears which flowed from every Eye, in the numerous Representations which were made of [Douglas]; the unparalleled Command which you appeared to have over every Affection of the human Breast: These are incontestable Proofs, that you possess the true theatric Genius of Shakespeare.59

92  Natasha Duquette Other writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Adam Ferguson, also defended the play against attacks from the presbyteries of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Alexander Wedderburn, editor of the Edinburgh Review, addressed the censorious clergymen directly, writing of Matilda’s prayerful soliloquies: ‘In all the sermons produced by the united genius of the Church of Scotland, I challenge you to produce anything more pure in morality, or more touching in eloquence’.60 Williams would have heard many formal sermons, growing up as the daughter of a devout Presbyterian widow after the death of her father. It was due to the encouragement of Presbyterian Rev. Andrew Kippis that Williams first began to publish. By including Douglas, a play written by a Presbyterian minister, in her novel, and having Julia endorse it, Williams intentionally adds her voice to a heated debate within her own ecclesial community. In her constructive and social ending for her heroine Julia, Williams also modifies the potential future for a woman of sensibility by providing a redemptive, hopeful twist. Julia, a sorrowful, contemplative woman drawn to natural landscapes, akin to John Home’s Matilda and JeanJacques Rousseau’s Julie, does not die a sudden, tragic death but survives in a supportive feminine community. One final question raised by Julia’s intertextuality is: why did Williams not more explicitly depict such feminine networks of support through her textual allusions and quotations? Intertextual absences or silences may be as important as intertextual presences. This was not something I attended to while actually editing and annotating Julia but the idea arose while reflecting on my experience of editing within the context of the 2013 conference ‘Pride & Prejudices: Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century’ organized by Gillian Dow and Jennie Batchelor at the Chawton House Library. The conference focused on eighteenth-century women’s writing, and this theme prompted me to think about Williams in the context of other female writers. A reviewer of Julia in the European Magazine compared Williams’s novel to Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle.61 Williams had met Smith in the 1780s, and if Smith was indeed an influence, Williams could have titled her novel ‘Emmelina’ instead of ‘Julia’. Williams also knew the poet Elizabeth Carter, yet she includes no Carter references amidst the multiple poetic quotations and allusions woven throughout Julia’s narrative, despite the fact that Julia is herself a female poet. Williams does reveal the influence of the Bluestockings, but only very obliquely, through her quick allusion to Elizabeth Montagu, in order to differentiate her critical focus from Montagu’s. Perhaps if Williams had written a second novel, at the turn of the century, she could have had her heroine attend a performance of Joanna Baillie’s De Monfort at Drury Lane, and weep over the sorrows of Jane De Monfort as portrayed by Sarah Siddons. Regardless of the minimal references to particular women writers in Julia, the literary ties that are formed by Williams connect her novel to debates within the French and Scottish Enlightenments, tensions

Julie and Julia  93 around censorship within the Presbyterian church and transitional shifts from the age of Sensibility to Romanticism, connections that, as an editor, it has been fascinating to trace.

Notes 1 V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Granada Publishing, 1979), p. 63. 2 Williams references Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Ruth, Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Luke and James in the course of her narrative. 3 H. M. Williams, Julia, ed. N. Duquette (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 7. 4 Williams, ‘An Address to Poetry’, in Julia, pp. 7–13, line 33. 5 Ibid., lines 39–40. 6 H. M. Williams, ‘To Mrs. Montagu’, Preface to Peru a Poem in Six Cantos (London: T. Cadell, 1784), pp. 2–5, line 38. 7 Williams, ‘An Address to Poetry’, lines 55–6. 8 E. Montagu, Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets (London: J. Dodsley, Baker and Leigh, and others, 1769), p. 153. 9 Montagu, Essay, p. 153. 10 Ibid., p. 152. Montagu’s association of solitude, night, limitlessness and terror aligns closely with Edmund Burke’s aesthetics in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 43, 59, 61, 62. 11 J. Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (Stuttgart: F. Fromann, 1970), p. 624. 12 Beattie, Dissertations, p. 625. 13 Williams, ‘An Address to Poetry’, lines 57–64. 14 Ibid., line 56. 15 Ibid., lines 89–92. 16 Ibid., lines 145–8. 17 In his Enquiry, Burke refers to ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all passions. Its object is the sublime’. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 136. 18 J. Wordsworth, Introduction, in Poems in Two Volumes, ed. J. Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994), vol. 1, p. 6. 19 H. M. Williams, ‘Sonnet: To the White Bird of the Tropic’, in B. St. Pierre, Paul and Virginia, trans. H. M. Williams, ed. J. Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock, 1989), p. 158, line 5. 20 H. M. Williams, ‘A Hymn Written in the Alps’, in A Tour in Switzerland, or a view of the present state of the governments and manners of those cantons: with comparative sketches of the present state of Paris, 2 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), vol. 2, pp. 16–19. 21 J. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 26. 22 J. Mee, ‘“A Good Cambrio-Briton”: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Helen Maria Williams and the Welsh Sublime in the 1790s’, in M. Constantine and D. Johnston (eds), Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), pp. 213–30, on p. 219. 23 T. Gray, ‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’, in Odes by Mr. Gray (Strawberry Hill: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), pp. 13–21, lines 15–24.

94  Natasha Duquette 24 Gray, Odes by Mr. Gray, note on p. 12. 25 Williams, ‘An Address to Poetry’, lines 193–200. 26 O. Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 108. 27 Gray, ‘The Bard’, line 95. 28 Ibid., lines 143–4. 29 Williams, ‘An Address to Poetry’, lines 201–208. 30 ‘Address to the Muses’, in J. Baillie, Poems Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners, ed. J. Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994), lines 127 and 142. 31 H. M. Williams, ‘Isaiah 49.15’, in Poems in Two Volumes, vol. 1, pp. 107–111. 32 D. Kennedy, ‘“Storms of Sorrow”: The Poetry of Helen Maria Williams’, in J. Boulad-Ayoub and others (eds), Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1991), pp. 77–91, on p. 85. 33 Williams, Julia, p. 149. 34 Williams, ‘The Bastille: a Vision’, in Julia, pp. 149–52, lines 37–40. 35 Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy, p. 111. 36 Duquette, Introduction, Julia, p. xxi. 37 Williams, ‘The Bastille: a Vision’, lines 89–90. 38 Williams, Tour in Switzerland, p. 7. 39 J. J. Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, tome premier (Paris: Madame veuve Perroneau, 1819), p. 109. 40 Williams, Tour in Switzerland, Williams’s footnote vol. 2, on p. 7. 41 A. Barbauld, Devotional Pieces compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job: To which are prefixed thoughts on the devotional taste, on sects, and on establishments (London: Joseph Johnson, 1775), p. 222. 42 F. Price, Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 27–8. 43 Williams, Julia, p. 67. 4 4 J. Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 231. 45 P. Garside, Introduction, in Julia: A Novel, 2 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), vol. 1, on p. xviii. 46 Ibid., p. xix. 47 J. Home, Douglas: A Tragedy. Adapted for theatrical representation, as performed at the Theatres-Royal, Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden (London: John Bell, 1791), p. 42, III. i. 97–8. 48 Williams, Julia, p. 19. 49 Williams, ‘Sonnet to Mrs. Siddons’, in Poems in Two Volumes, vol. 2, pp. 179–80. I am grateful to Deborah Kennedy for reminding me of this sonnet. 50 See, for example, M. S. Morgan, ‘Speaking with a Double Voice: John Home’s Douglas and the idea of Scotland’, Scottish Literary Review, 4:1 (2012), pp. 35–56. In the same year, K. J. McGinley’s ‘“My Name is Norval”: The Revision of Character Names in John Home’s Douglas’ was published in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35:1 (2012), pp. 67–83. Neither article mentions Helen Maria Williams’s reference to the play. 51 A. B., Douglas, a tragedy, weighed in the balances, and found wanting (Edinburgh: W. Gray and W. Peter, 1757), p. 23. 52 Douglas, a tragedy, weighed in the balances, p. 20. 53 Home, Douglas, p. 46, III.i. 232–6.

Julie and Julia  95 54 Ibid., p. 59, IV.i. 261–2. 55 Ibid., p. 74, V.i. 723–5. 56 B. Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 167 57 Home, Douglas, p. 76, V.i. 779–84. 58 Williams, Julia, p. 17 59 D. Hume, ‘An Address to the Author’, in Douglas: A Tragedy. As it is acted in the theatres in Great Britain and Ireland. By the Rev. John Home. To which are prefixed 1. An address to the author. By David Hume Esq. (Dublin: G. Faulkner, J. Hoey and others, 1757), p. 4. 60 A. Wedderburn, ‘A song: or, a sermon. A new ballad. On the censure by ministers of the Church of Scotland of the first performance of “Douglas” by John Home’, dated 29 January 1757. Huntington Library, ESTC (RLIN), T122900. 61 Anon., European Magazine, 17 June 1790, p. 435.

7 Romancing the past Women’s historical fiction, editorial pains and practices Fiona Price

In the ‘Literary Retrospection’ which opens Romance Readers and ­Romance Writers (1810) Sarah Green contends that, as a ‘genius’, Walter Scott should be ‘superior to the dull business of comparing and arranging’, otherwise known as ‘Editorship’.1 As my own experiences working with Green’s Private History of the Court of Edward IV (1808) and Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs, A Romance (1810) reveal, Green’s ignoble sketch of the ‘business’ of editing is suggestive. In line with Green’s hints about the degradingly commercial nature of the process, scholarly editing presents a number of hazards, particularly when the works under consideration are written by women. For one thing, in self-interested search of an audience, the modern editor of women’s historical fiction might be tempted to elide the works’ use of romance, afraid of the genre’s association with feminized excess. Yet the role of romance within historical fiction cannot be ignored: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, romance is a category with considerable historical and political weight, which these authors shape in order to reconstruct the nation. For another, when the scholarly editor becomes aware of the way such writers manipulate both romance and history, she also grasps that their texts always come into modern hands in some sense pre-edited, a realization that generates an uneasy self-consciousness about secondary editorial intervention. The difficulty is exacerbated because, like other female writers of historical fiction, Porter, with her increasingly elaborate prefaces, and Sarah Green, with her footnotes, both attempt to police the ideas of national heroism and courtly behaviour. In claiming this role of ­politico-romantic arbiter, they potentially place both themselves, and the modern editor who follows them, in a position of ridicule. As editor of successive versions of her texts, Porter’s apparently bombastic evocation of the historical novelist herself as national hero is particularly awkward for a modern scholar to mediate. The challenge is to present Porter accurately while maintaining her as a commodity pleasing enough to be saleable. Mocking the potential clash between the commercial labour of editorship and the inspiration of the author of historical romance, Green at least opts for humour. Unluckily, in painstakingly

Romancing the past  97 unpacking the absurd allusions in her secret history, the scholarly editor has no such defence. She is pushed into a position of pedantry beside the unfettered comic associations of Green’s text. Allowing romance to be visible in all its apparent floridity, on the one hand, and faithfully footnoting obscure gossip, on the other, the scholarly editor feels in danger of becoming a lesser version of one of Scott’s editorial figures, a failed Jedediah Cleishbotham. However, the interrogation of such pernickety editorial processes produces a realization: even in the years before Scott’s Waverley Novels made fictional editors so fashionable, the trope of editing was key to the complex generic play of the historical novel. A conscientious editor despite Green’s slurs, Scott himself would later ‘posit not one author but many’ as the anonymous ‘Author of Waverley’; moreover, when the supposed antiquarian editor of Ivanhoe, Laurence Templeton, writes to ‘Rev. Dr Dryasdust’ in the ‘dedicatory epistle’, he recalls the suggestion that the ‘author’ of The Antiquary (1816) has ‘availed himself’ of ‘antiquarian stores’ to supply his ‘own indolence or poverty of invention’. 2 Where historical fiction is concerned, Scott disingenuously suggests, the author is surprisingly similar to the editor – both undertake the bathetic activities of compiling and arranging highlighted by Green. Scott’s lauded historical fictions are, though, usually connected not with women’s earlier historical fiction but, as Peter Garside suggests, with a ‘general masculinization’ that becomes central to the Victorian novel. 3 When Scott himself writes romance he risks a negative association with the feminine, from which he struggles hard to escape even when (as in the introduction to the Magnum Opus edition of St Ronan’s Well (1823)) he acknowledges a debt to his female forbears.4 Yet both Scott and his precursors, attempting to construct the nation out of disparate generic materials, must use the figure of the editor to mediate between history and romance. As Green’s work hints and as Scott’s work confirms, used strategically, the pedantry of an inbuilt editorial figure distracts from the extravagance of romance, licensing its use. As well as contextualizing (and perhaps desexualizing) romance, the editor of the historical novel must unpack the significance of the form’s generic troubles – all the while being implicated by the act of editorship in those very complexities. For the stadial historians of the mid-to-late eighteenth century, chivalry and its representative genre, romance, formed a vital link between modern manners and those of the past. As John Millar comments in his Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1773) certainly in Europe the manners of chivalry ‘may still be observed to have a good deal of influence upon the taste and sentiments even of the present age’.5 The dispute over the role of chivalry (its continuity, erasure or distortion) in modern life shaped the eighteenth-century debate concerning the relative quality of novel and romance – a debate that impacted particularly heavily on historical fiction.6 Having posited

98  Fiona Price the continuity of chivalry, in Observations, Millar suggests its generic consequences: while ‘the inimitable ridicule of Cervantes’ and a change in manners, ‘explod[ed] the ancient romances’ (presumably because of absurdity), ‘the serious novels’ of France and England ‘represent in a more moderate degree the same ideas of military honour and of love and galantry [sic] which prevailed in the writings of a former period’.7 In this account, purged and rendered generically feasible by the novel, chivalry survives. Politically, chivalric romance could be decried, interrogated or celebrated. Both Mary Wollstonecraft in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) and Charlotte Smith in Desmond (1792) debunk chivalric romance in order to query the distribution of property and power. Alternately, conservative writers could deploy the idea of a romance-based continuity with the past to reinforce the status quo. The very plurality of romance’s uses complicates the challenge to the editor of women’s historical fiction, particularly given its already gendered associations with desire and sexuality. In Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), which is, like Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), subtitled ‘a romance’, romance is given an almost religious dimension. Heroism subsumes the sexual impulse. Perhaps as a result of this idealizing tendency, the work is (also like Ivanhoe) eventually reprinted for children, its enthusiasm interpreted as somehow juvenile. In contrast, Sarah Green’s Private History of the Court of England (1808) is a roman à clef, an exposure of the sexual impulse rather than a redirection. As such, it might be read as a kind of debasement of the serious discourse of history. Part of the task of the editor of women’s historical fiction is to make such disparate works, and their approach to the chivalric, readable in the twenty-first century. For loyalists like Clara Reeve and Jane West, the historical novel in particular had an important role in ensuring social continuity: properly executed, it could draw on elements of both romance and novel to render aristocratic heroism probable. However, the process seemed fraught with generic peril. Clara Reeve, for example, is haunted by fears of literary decline and political breakage. In her Progress of Romance (1785) Reeve famously distinguishes between the ‘Romance’, as ‘fabulous’ ‘heroic fable’, and the ‘Novel’, which ‘gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass everyday before our eyes’.8 While such generic distinctness is sometimes necessary, Reeve suggests it can also have negative consequences, expunging or rendering ridiculous the heroic and chivalric. She insists that the beneficial qualities of romance must be maintained and her Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon (1793) posits historical fiction as the ideal vehicle for this preservation. From Reeve’s conservative perspective, historical fiction must combine the chivalry of the romance with the probability of the novel in order to bear the ideological weight of continuity between feudal past and present. All

Romancing the past  99 the same, her attempt to combine the ‘ideas of military honour’ that characterize ancient romance with historical veracity is problematic: the book refers to the ‘age of heroes’ but the British Critic finds that the ‘historical extracts’ and ‘register of the Knights of the Garter’ are ‘strong soporifics’.9 Faced with such unentertaining content, the twenty-​ first-century editor of historical fiction must understand that distrust of historical romance can itself be historicized, having its cause in the post-French Revolution debate as much as in the masculinized aesthetic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics. While Reeve wishes to create a conservative national romance by deploying history, in her ‘Literary Retrospection’ Sarah Green wants to prevent the genre’s appropriation by radicalism. Therefore the bombast of romance becomes a source of ridicule. While ancient romance promoted ‘gallantry and heroism’, Green suggests that the form has become ridiculously historically outmoded, as we do not ‘so frequently take the law into our own hands’; contemporary ‘“tales of time past”’ are of even less merit than other forms of the genre (perhaps because they inspire lawlessness in the present).10 Charlotte Dacre’s The Libertine (1807) or Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers (1803), gothic works which render the excesses of aristocratic vice and political discontent enjoyable, are anathema to Green. Her text deploys the commercial, the probable and the material to satirize anti-aristocratic excess: Pickersgill has the poetic ‘rickets’, Francis Lathom churns out product ‘for his bread’ and, thanks to the ‘ingenuity’ of the sales-seeking ‘booksellers’, The Monk of the Udolpho was a title without a book or author to match till Horsley Curties accepted the challenge.11 These authors’ pleasurable portraits of past vice are not, however, as problematic for Green as the ‘historical’ romances of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, presumably because of the greater apparent probability of the French writer’s works. In relation to Genlis’s Knights of the Swan (published in translation in 1796), Green remarks that the author is ‘very anxious, on all occasions, that the reader should not do what she herself has done, that is, confound historical with fictitious incidents’.12 Tellingly, Genlis’s Knights of the Swan combines the ‘most splendid and interesting usages of ancient chivalry’ (as the preface has it) with the repeated assertion that the monarch must listen to the people.13 The implicit danger for Green is that the confusion between history and romance may render the populist impulse both more plausible and more heroic. In order to undermine this plausible romantic populism, Green turns to the material practices of publishing to mock Genlis. If one level of probability – the historical – can be summoned to support the (in this case progressive) ideals of romance, Green will attack the composite by alluding to the more vulgar probabilities of material interest. The modern editor of historical fiction must bear in mind the way in which the tension between the idealism of romance and the supposed

100  Fiona Price materiality of history was sharpened by political unease concerning the nature of progress and of modernity itself. For Reeve and Green, worry about the promiscuous use of fact and fiction is connected with unease about progressive or radical thought. Such anxieties generate the desire to repair both romance and the polis (evident in the more moderate work of Jane Porter) or (in Green’s case) to expose the hypocrisy of reading vice as chivalric. However, the writer who undertakes such policing finds him- or herself in the potentially awkward position of moral judge, a role it proves difficult to adopt with grace. In rendering heroism probable, the writer of historical fiction is vulnerable to idealism, on one hand, and self-importance, on the other: both open the way to satire. Particularly when the author is also an editor, editorial intervention exacerbates the problem. Green is right: the ‘dull’ compiler and arranger is likely to ‘fetter’ genius, that is, to undercut heroic content.14 As the original editor or her modern scholarly successor juxtaposes romance with details of commerce and the literary marketplace, she may generate the kind of bathos Green produces deliberately. Such difficulties confront the scholarly editor of Jane Porter, who herself produced successive editions of her own novels. Jane Porter is sensitive to the tension between the heroic code of chivalry and commerce. As Thomas McLean explores, Jane Porter’s 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw adapts the emphasis on stages found in conjectural or stadial history.15 Thaddeus moves from the heroic romance of a Polish fight for liberty to a battle with commercial modernity in England. In the process, the novel provides a warning about the incompatibility of heroism and business that reverberates uncomfortably with Porter’s own struggles. In The Scottish Chiefs, Porter’s choice of a thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century setting allows the problem of (anti-heroic) commerce to be disguised. On the one hand, there is aristocratic greed and selfishness, on the other, idealistic patriotism (carefully moderated and distinguished from revolution). As William Wallace contends with the venal Heselrigge under the rule of Edward I, Porter emphasizes the importance of ‘respect for noble progenitors’ (both English and Scottish).16 In this narrative, within a social order based on inheritance, the chivalric and heroic extend to become the patriotic. In this instance, to undertake the editorial task of contextualizing ‘romance’ is to realize that Porter deploys it, not idly or immaturely, but with political purpose. Insisting on the veracity of her historical sources (and thus introducing the element of probability), Porter allows the ‘romance’ of inherited values a contemporary relevance. Nonetheless, the egotism and pressures of commerce buried in the narrative resurface in Porter’s increasingly elaborate editorial apparatus, as she attempts to manage her literary reputation. Porter’s editorial difficulties generate an obstacle for the modern editor, who, like Laurence Templeton in Scott’s Ivanhoe, ‘researches’ with care but remains uneasily aware of the issue of commercial ‘popularity’.17

Romancing the past  101 In her first preface to The Scottish Chiefs, Porter states that she has painted ‘the portrait of one of the most complete heroes that ever filled the page of history’.18 As she emphasizes her painstaking research in an attempt to give this heroic picture probability, her tribute to her hero spills over into self-praise. ‘Delighted with’ the ‘most dear proof of kindred’ between the contemporary Scottish people and their ancestors, Porter explains how she ‘fondly lingered over [her] work’, transforming past heroes into ‘friends whose nobility of spirit honoured the illustrious stems from which they are sprung’.19 This close alliance presages Porter’s increasing sense of the author of historical fiction as herself a kind of national hero, an image that becomes amplified in successive editions. In the preface to the 1828 edition, Porter has ‘the feelings of a child rejoicing in the approbation of indulgent parents!’ Although she herself is from ‘England’, her wording implies her heroic descent – those ‘parents’ she mentions are the heroic ‘people of her hero’s nation’. 20 Porter’s editorial suggestions that she had influenced Scott also seemed immodest to her contemporaries. In response to the republication of Porter’s works in Bentley’s Standard Novels, the Aberdeen Magazine published a letter to ‘relieve’ Porter from ‘the necessity which you have been sometimes under, of sounding your own panegyric’: in claiming she inspired Scott, Porter is ‘too bashful by half’. 21 In ‘The Author to her Friendly Readers’ (the 1831 preface to Thaddeus of Warsaw), Porter herself suggests her ‘epistle’ is somewhat ‘egotistical’. 22 Such egotism corresponds uneasily with the commercial context which she exposes and which her modern editor is honestly bound to expand. In her letter to her readership Porter suggests that she is merely falling in with the ‘blameless fashion of the day’ but her picture of innocent compliance is quickly tainted. 23 ‘The social taste of the times has lately fully shown how advantageous the like conversational disclosures have proved to the recent republications of the celebrated “Waverley Novels”’, Porter insists. 24 The affective ties that characterize the reading community have been swiftly overlaid by the criterion of financial and reputational success. Although all the Standard Novels required new prefaces, here Porter shows an awareness of commerce and competition that sits oddly with the heroic pretensions of historical romance. The idea of added novelty to sell a new edition was certainly not new to Porter. When she negotiated for the republication of The Scottish Chiefs with George Virtue in 1840, troubled by copyright issues, she proposed leaving out the preface she had written for Henry Colburn’s 1831 edition of the novel, ‘considering it to be still [Colburn’s] property’. 25 Porter instead promises, via Nathaniel Parker Willis, to write Virtue ‘a preface, or introductory [?] to the work, of some length; – amalgamating the substance of the successive Prefaces’. 26 The matter is hard-headedly financial: Virtue has proposed ‘to give me £300 for my authority to publish “The Scottish chiefs”’ (an amount later reduced – in November she

102  Fiona Price instructs Willis to try ‘to get […] as much more beyond the £200, as you can’). 27 If financial constraints are at odds with Porter’s insistence on heroism and romance, her attitude to Scott, the ‘once Great Unknown’, now the ‘avowed author of the Waverley Novels’ is equally problematic. 28 Initially Porter praised Scott’s novels. Writing to her sister Anna Maria in 1815, she finds Guy Mannering ‘an admirable performance’, and does ‘not think that the author has lowered his fame an inch’ from the standard of Waverley. 29 However, later, when she thinks ‘Wallace’ is ‘forgotten’, she becomes more critical: (in my opinion) the Romance of Ivanhoe (excepting the Jewess) is a complete failure. – The dialogue […] inflated to absolute vapour; and the style of the narrative is broken for harmony, by strange words of his own creation – and other inconsistencies you will observe as soon as you read the work.30 This shift is explained by Porter’s own financial struggles in the intervening years, compounded by managing her brother, Sir Robert Kerr Porter’s debts and the failure of her play ‘Switzerland’ in 1819. 31 Although the private letters containing these observations were unavailable to me at the time I edited The Scottish Chiefs (suggesting the difficulties that face an editor of a fixed paper text rather than an amendable virtual one), the inclusion of the Aberdeen Magazine review in the appendices of my Broadview text points to the perceived self-interest of Porter as author and to her troubled relationship with Scott. 32 The reputational management that author- and editorship requires in the period is evident both in the words of ‘PETER PUFF’ and in Porter’s letters. As her private correspondence makes clear, social assets require as much management as literary ones. Again, Scott forms a kind of benchmark. When Porter is relieved by a note from Lady Abercorn who seemed to have cut her, she draws comfort from Scott’s similar experience: Walter Scott expressed to me his wonder at not having had a line of any sort from Lady A […] I doubt not that it has been uneasiness of mind on her part that has made her hitherto appear to neglect us, the same uneasiness, which now, can be the only cause of her seeing to neglect Walter Scott.33 Just as Porter’s early hero, Thaddeus, on his entry into Britain, must struggle with the apparent neglect of his noble connection as well as with the exigencies of commerce, Porter is reliant not solely on the market, but on patronage. Through the wish-fulfilment of fiction, Thaddeus retains his dignity. Porter’s financial and reputational struggles only intensify.

Romancing the past  103 Porter tries to balance the heroism required by the Napoleonic Wars with the grubby exigencies of everyday life. Given this, although a suspicious reading of Porter’s editorial practices reintroduces the tension between romance and commerce that she has tried to expunge, her paratexts can also be interpreted as attempts to extend the heroic community of the novel. In The Scottish Chiefs, Porter extends the chivalric idea of knighthood to the entire virtuous population. She devotes time to an examination of the contours of female patriotism while emphasizing, through Edwin, a ‘lovely enthusiastic boy’, the patriotism of children. 34 Disguising himself as a corpse in order eventually to become reanimated in the fight for Scotland, Edwin is described by Wallace as ‘the first patriot knight’.35 ‘Like Cupid in arms’, at Stirling Castle, Edwin pretends to be carrying a message from an English soldier to his love, aiding the Scottish capture of the fortress.36 As all suffer, so all are interpolated into the patriotic narrative. The only affection is the mutual one for the nation. In her ‘Retrospective Introduction’ to the Standard Novel edition of The Scottish Chiefs, Porter extends her heroic project, including an admiring enquiry from Warren Hastings: ‘he asked me how it was possible that a person, then so young as their author was, could have known so much of the human heart’. 37 This is not merely a strained attempt at self-praise, but part of a narrative of anti-commercial patriotism. Before including Hastings’s remark, Porter recounts how, as children in Edinburgh, brought up without the ‘indulgences of a nursery’, she and her siblings are able to rehearse Edwin’s patriotic role. 38 They are able to mourn yet admire the Jacobite heroine, Jeannie Cameron, whose death strikes an elegiac note. Through the children’s reception of this plaid-covered figure, who collapses together several Jacobite heroines, female sexual misconduct is at once linked to, and cloaked by, heroism. As editorial intervention reveals, Porter alludes at once to Flora MacDonald, Prince Charles’s lover; to the daughter of Cameron of Glendessary (also known to have romantic links with Charles Edward Stuart); and to the wife of Sir Archibald Cameron, who allows a religious dimension to be added in the form of Jeannie’s burial at the ‘manse’. 39 By unpacking Porter’s portrayal of Jeannie as composite character, my edition reveals Porter’s anxious over-determination of the figure of the patriot. Porter struggles with the possibility of shaping a heroic yet probable ‘romance’ in the commercial present. In an attempt to be faithful both to Porter’s idealism and her self-interest, my edition attempts to balance an introductory discussion of Porter’s extensive programme of heroic improvement with appendices that reveal her idea of author as hero. Porter’s egotism remains but is contextualized within her wider project. While Porter’s struggles with the construction of heroism in the present need to be sympathetically mediated, Sarah Green’s Private History calls for still more intensive editorial intervention. The novel, an ‘ingenious

104  Fiona Price satire’ (as one reviewer labelled it), indulges in a kind of double reversal that requires a strong sense of the generic conventions at work in fictions like The Scottish Chiefs.40 Initially, it seems as if the book overturns generic expectations by rejecting the idealism of romance, insisting instead upon the historical continuity of vice. Claiming to be an account of the domestic life of Edward IV (1442–1483), the Private History explores, alongside other contemporary scandals, the licentiousness that Green associated with the Prince of Wales and the Whig followers of Charles James Fox. Green’s insertion of the gossip, scurrility and ephemera of her own day into the fifteenth century generates an interpretative barrier that the editor must at least attempt to lower. Even more than an avowedly serious work of historical fiction such as The Scottish Chiefs, this satire suggests that historical fiction is always about the present and always requires decoding. But while such decoding is part of the editorial function, it can also operate as a distraction – in the search for contemporary allusions, it is possible to overlook the ultimate effect of Green’s exploitation of generic instability. The ideals of romance, and the notion of a chivalric past which she has apparently rejected, linger in the text to undercut contemporary depravity. Aristocratic vice should be mocked, not, as in other, more gothic fictions, enjoyed. As romance becomes more desirable, history, outrageously jumbled, makes vice seem incredible. Nonetheless, the Private History’s scurrility, obscurity and pessimism raise once again the editorial problem of ‘popularity’ which occupies Laurence Templeton. Conscious of the book’s controversial nature, Green plays her own editorial games. In her preface to the Private History, she gestures towards a historiographical context and then destabilizes it. Drawing on the idea of universal history, she begins by appealing to those readers who ‘are fond of tracing the characters of mankind, and their close similarity in every age’.41 By way of contrast, she then adapts the stadial emphasis on ‘manners’, which, to Scottish stadial historians like William Robertson and John Millar, necessarily reflected the government and economic formation of the day. Green, however, emphasizes that although the degree of ‘refinement’ changes, such alterations are superficial. In An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft had argued that polished manners did not signify real improvement but that mass political education might.42 Green concedes that genuine ‘improvements of knowledge’ could bring changes in character.43 Yet, even as she implies that she acts in the public interest, she seems very doubtful that the moral and intellectual change she espouses can take place. Whatever the external trappings of the age, vice, not true romance or idealized chivalry, forms the point of continuity between past and present. Having twisted the stadial emphasis on manners to legitimate her enterprise, Green begins her first chapter by stressing the unreliability

Romancing the past  105 of primary historical sources. Since ‘The historic page is too frequently clouded with error’ ‘the pen should ever be impartial’.44 Even as she hints at research amongst ‘agreeing authors’ and ‘well-preserved manuscripts’, at compiling and arranging of scholarship, the synecdoche of the ‘pen’ enables her to avoid responsibility. Impartiality and accuracy are evoked (a reminder that there is some truth in her use of contemporary gossip) and immediately ironized (in the Private History any such truth is heavily distorted). Green’s use of historical footnotes is equally peculiar. First, she distorts eighteenth-century gossip. She details Warwick’s delight that Lady Elizabeth Grey has abandoned Edward, thus making an oblique reference to Mrs Fitzherbert, the Catholic woman with whom the Prince Regent had a morganatic marriage. Having instituted such historical confusion, she then supports her description of King Louis XI with a footnote saying ‘See Mezerai’s History of France’ – the veil of historical accuracy is thin enough to become another joke.45 Similarly, having glossed the term ‘livery’ on the work’s first page, she footnotes it again when she refers to the contemporary scandal of Mrs Gregson’s affair with her coachman; Mrs Gregson apparently ‘would order his breakfast and his enormous livery’.46 This is a dirty joke which modern editorial practices force the present-day editor to underline. Along with Green’s elusiveness, the modern editor of the Private History has to cope with her flamboyant parallelism, problematic even by the standards of the historical novel. If Porter assures us that she ‘seldom lead[s] [her hero] to any spot in Scotland whither some written or oral testimony’ has not conducted her, Green shamelessly distorts the detail of the War of the Roses. At one point, for example, she describes Edward IV as having ‘lollard’ sympathies.47 In more formal histories this suggestion is not denied – indeed it does not seem to be mentioned, presumably because it is so outré. For the modern editor, such inaccuracies breed an increasingly irritable reaching after fact where the reign of Edward IV is concerned. Interpretative complications also arise when Green destabilizes public history through the search for private gossip. The necessary historical decoding is straightforward enough as she charts the affairs of the Prince of Wales and the more notorious aristocracy: Green traces the behaviour of the ‘Heir Apparent’, Edward IV (that is, the Prince of Wales, later George IV) with Maria de Rosenvault (Prince George’s mistress, Mary Robinson); she disapprovingly details his relationship with Lady Elizabeth Grey (Mrs Maria Fitzherbert); and charts his mistreatment of his lawful wife, Bona of Saxony (Princess Caroline). However, as Green multiplies her targets in the second volume, some contemporary scandals prove hard to locate. She mentions, for instance, the diseased ‘Sir Thomas Vaughan without a nose’, but although syphilis was a subject of eighteenth-century satire, identifying a particular sufferer remains problematic given the often-coded

106  Fiona Price terms of contemporary reference.48 The editor is forced, like Laurence Templeton, to concede the ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘trivial’ nature of his researches.49 Engrossed by such pursuits, it is possible to overlook Green’s clever exploitation of generic tension. When Green talks, for example, of the order of the ‘Knights of the Whip! chiefly composed of stableboys’, there is no referent in the reign of Edward IV. 50 The early nineteenth-century fashion for gentlemen coachmen is set in deflationary contrast with chivalric ideas of knighthood. Romance has not been removed from the text, despite Green’s pessimistic suggestions. Its idealized standards of behaviour, rather than history, make the contemporary fact of the Earl of Barrymore’s Four-in-Hand club of aristocratic jockeys and would-be grooms absurd. But Green also exploits the historical dimensions of her work to satirical purpose. When there are historical parallels, past and present facts are vertiginously distorted, generating a sense of improbability. Attacking Fox’s supposed political cynicism, Green suggests that Lovelace, in this text an untrustworthy advisor to Prince Edward, ‘clamoured for a union between the houses of York and Lancaster’; although some doubt surrounds the actions of the historical Sir Henry Lovelace, after hanging back at the Second Battle of St Albans, he switched sides, becoming Lancastrian.51 Parallels are further strained, a few sentences later, when Lovelace (Charles James Fox) takes the Prince to ‘scenes of midnight festivity’ and ‘to tennis courts’ – now even the contemporary narrative of vice is rendered bizarre. 52 The inclusion of this unlikely sporting activity alludes to the events of the French Revolution – the Third Estate met at a tennis court when they were locked out of the Estates-General on 20 June 1789. In the generic mêlée, vice is at once a matter of fact (Lovelace did change allegiance; Fox is involved in the Prince’s sexual and political peccadillos) and as improbable as anything found in romance. Despite Green’s historiographical and didactic justifications, her subject matter might appear at once too ephemeral and too bleak to merit the effort of tracking and footnoting elusive early nineteenth-century scandals and their supposed medieval equivalents. Yet to the arranger and ‘compiler’ it becomes evident that the Private History’s approach to sexual vice, in particular, is both distinctive and hazardous. 53 In defending Mary Robinson and other ‘deluded victim[s] of refinement’, Green puts herself in a difficult position.54 Although Robinson had her vindicators, particularly in private, a stance of public support for the notorious ‘Perdita’ was harder for a respectable woman to maintain. As Judith Pascoe notes, Robinson ‘used a combination of great charm and name-dropping to overcome social reservations in many of her female contemporaries’.55 Such tactics did not always work. Despite the actress’s adept manipulation of the public and private, the Porter sisters themselves had felt the need to retreat from the acquaintance. Green,

Romancing the past  107 however, exploits Robinson’s status as public woman, actress and mistress, blurring the lines between the intimate and the official in order to highlight male depravity. In Green’s account, female circulation and commodification become pitiable. When Green alludes to Robinson’s affair with Sir Banastre Tarleton, she enters into a textual realm already awkwardly filled with counterfactual material but she does so in order to construct her heroine as virtuous commodity. During the couple’s liaison, Robinson (radical in her own sympathies) had written political material on behalf of the pro-slavery former cavalry commander. In Green’s account, Robinson’s political inconsistencies vanish: Robinson would ‘with indefatigable kindness, rise from her bed in the dead of night […] and often prove’ to Tarleton’s ‘accusers […] how basely he was calumniated’. 56 Remaining loyal, the mistress moves beyond the sexual realm in an attempt to maintain her use value while in male possession. More dubious still is Green’s assertion that ‘from her scanty purse, [Robinson] would satisfy, as far as she was able, his clamorous creditors’ – the couple were known for their extravagant lifestyle but Green chooses to focus solely on Robinson’s well-established generosity. In this narrative, such financial and political loyalty leads to the incident that ‘deprived’ Robinson ‘for ever of the use of her limbs’. 57 The female body is consumed to the point of breakage by male libertinage. Although Green’s bold (perhaps too bold) assertions of Robinson’s ‘virtue’ allow a certain tonal uncertainty or scepticism to creep in, there is enough consistency elsewhere (for example, in Green’s treatment of Dorothy Jordan, mistress to the Duke of Clarence) to suggest that the author is indeed ‘endeavour[ing] to shew every possible protection’ to ‘a sex, subject to many oppressions’. 58 The text’s bizarre generic mixture enables her to offer a substitute for the gallantry absent in Perdita’s ‘romance’ of real life. With its use of romance – and sometimes the bold declaration of this generic affiliation in the subtitle – the historical novel was politically significant. For both conservative writers, like Reeve, and more moderate reformists, like Porter, appealing to history offered a way of making the chivalric values of romance more probable. Yet the genre’s use of romance and its ideological dimension proved problematic. Even (perhaps particularly) when employed by anti-Jacobin novelists, the form was vulnerable to satire because of its insistence on the probability of heroism. The very flamboyance of its claims of virtue encourages mockery. The editor of such fiction is caught in a meta-version of the same generic trap, trying on the one hand, to manage the reception of chivalry and romance, and, on the other, more practically, to earn a place in literary history for the text itself. This editorial snare is evident in Porter’s prefatory efforts to shape her heroic community, while simultaneously attempting to affirm her own literary and historical importance. Green, in contrast, attempts to exploit the generic dilemma

108  Fiona Price and its risks. In her preface and notes, she plays with the probable and the historical, only to undermine them by alluding to contemporary scandal. Green’s tactics transport the real behaviours at the heart of rumour into the realm of fiction, allowing them to be judged by the standards of romance, which she officially repudiates. At the same time, Green’s generic play allows her to abdicate responsibility. Bound by academic convention, her editor is left to manage allusion, instability and scurrility. Like Porter and Green, the modern editor struggles with the critical heritage generated by those original tensions between the probable and the improbable, the novel and the romance, history and fiction. The role is made more difficult, too, by the existence of Scott’s masculine author/ editors – figures with ideological purpose that, at least in part, paradoxically function to make his texts appear non-partisan. Historical fiction’s vulnerability to bathetic (and politically motivated) satire in fact goes some way to explain the multiplicity of Scott’s authorial and editorial personae. From the first series of Tales of My Landlord on, Scott responds to the vulnerability of chivalric historical fiction by welcoming what Anna Seward calls the ‘leaden incrustations’ of the editor into his text.59 Through Jedediah Cleishbotham, Dr Dryasdust and Laurence Templeton, the text internalizes and controls the bathetic impulse, creating space elsewhere for Scott to explore the chivalric. Instead of mocking the bombast of romance, the reader smiles fondly at pedantry and enjoys the relative freedoms of fiction. Thus, a kind of compromise is reached between materialist modernity and chivalric tradition and the mixed (and imaginary) British constitution. When Scott (in part through commercial necessity) edits the Magnum Opus under his own name, he remains conscious of this lesson regarding editorial liability. Despite the success of the Waverley Novels, in the ‘Postscript that should have been a Preface’ Scott warily introduces ‘himself in the third person singular’ to avoid the charge of egotism. Yet this distancing gesture cannot, he argues, be sustained, its ‘seeming modesty’, ‘overbalanced by the inconvenience of stiffness and affectation which attends it’.60 Immodest in his very modesty, the author/editor struggles with instability. Fortunately, the contemporary editor of women’s historical fiction does not have to cope with this dual role. She must, however, contend with the after-effects of Scott’s editorial and authorial success. In the Magnum Opus when Scott defends his decision to change to the first person, he argues that ‘the Commentaries of Caesar’ and the ‘Autobiography of Alexander the Corrector’ suffered from the ‘affectation’ of the third person.61 Although this is a (self-)criticism, Scott nonetheless allies himself with the masculine, the classical, the statesmanlike and the historical. The works he mentions lack the requisite modesty, but survive. Often authored by women, historical fiction before Waverley has not been nearly so lucky.

Romancing the past  109

Notes 1 S. Green, Romance Readers and Romance Writers: A Satirical Novel, 3 vols (London: Hookham, 1810), vol. 1, pp. v, xii. 2 C. McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 8; W. Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. I. Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14. 3 P. Garside, ‘The Early Nineteenth-Century English Novel, 1820–1836’, in L. Rodensky (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 21–40, on p. 22. 4 See M. Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 164; W. Scott, St Ronan’s Well, ed. A. Lang (Boston: Dane Estes, 1894), p. xvii. 5 J. Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, 2nd edn (London: Murray, 1773), p. 80. 6 For a succinct account of romance see I. Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–6. 7 Millar, Observations, p. 80. 8 C. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols (Colchester: for the author by Keymer; [London]: Robinson, 1785), vol. 1, p. 111. 9 ‘Memoirs of Sir Roger de Clarendon’, British Critic, 2 (December 1793), pp. 383–8, on pp. 385, 386. 10 Green, Romance Readers, vol. 1, p. v. 11 Ibid., pp. viii, x, v. 12 Ibid., p. xii. 13 S. F. Genlis, Knights of the Swan, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute; London: Vernor and Hood, 1796), vol. 1, p. viii. 14 Green, Romance Readers, p. xii. 15 T. McLean, ‘Nobody’s Argument: Jane Porter and the Historical Novel’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 7:2 (2007), pp. 88–103. 16 J. Porter, The Scottish Chiefs, A Romance (1810), ed. F. Price (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 41. All references are to this edition. 17 Scott, Ivanhoe, p. 13. 18 Porter, Chiefs, p. 41. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 723. 21 P. Puff, ‘Letters to Certain Persons. Epistle 1. To Miss Jane Porter’, The Aberdeen Magazine (October 1831), pp. 552–7, quoted in Porter, Chiefs, p. 755. 22 J. Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803), Standard Novels (London: Colburn and Bentley; Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute; Dublin: Cumming, 1831), vol. 4, p. v. 23 Porter, Thaddeus, p. v. 24 Ibid., p. vi. 25 J. Porter to G. Virtue, 20 July 1840, Esher, Huntington Library, CA, Jane Porter papers (hereafter HL JPP), POR2179. All subsequent letters are from this collection. 26 J. Porter to N. Parker Willis, 26 October 1839, Brighton, HL JPP, POR2187. 27 J. Porter to [N. Parker Willis], 2 November 1839, Brighton, HL JPP, POR2188. 28 Porter, Thaddeus, p. vi. 29 J. Porter to A. M. Porter, April 1815 [Long Ditton Kingston, Surrey], HL JPP, POR1703.

110  Fiona Price 30 J. Porter to A. M. Porter, 24 February 1820, Brighton, HL JPP, POR1782. 31 For her brother’s debts, see J. Porter to A. M. Porter, [Sept] [1814], Stanwell [?], HL JPP, POR1697. See T. McLean, ‘Jane Porter, Edmund Kean, and the Tragedy of Switzerland’, Keats-Shelley Review, 25:2 (2011), pp. 147–59. 32 Porter, Chiefs, pp. 754–61. 33 J. Porter to A. M. Porter, [April 19] [1815], [London], HL JPP, POR1705. 34 Porter, Chiefs, p. 183. 35 Ibid., p. 203. 36 Ibid., p. 194. 37 Ibid., p. 736. 38 Ibid., p. 735. 39 Ibid., p. 734. 40 Anon., ‘Introduction: Novellists [sic]’, Flowers of Literature (1808–9), p. lxx, in P. D. Garside, J. Belanger and S. A. Ragaz (eds), British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation and Reception, designer A. Mandal, available online at www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/reviews/ priv08-49.html (accessed 1 July 2008). 41 S. Green, The Private History of the Court of England, ed. Fiona Price (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), p. 5. 42 M. Wollstonecraft, Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vol. 6, p. 17. 43 Green, History, p. 5. 4 4 Ibid., p. 15. 45 Ibid., p. 50. 46 Ibid., p. 175. 47 Ibid., p. 36. 48 Ibid., p. 145. 49 Scott, Ivanhoe, p. 13. 50 Green, History, p. 175. 51 Ibid., p. 34. 52 Ibid. 53 Green, Romance Readers, p. xi. 54 Green, History, p. 173. 55 J. Pascoe, Mary Robinson: Selected Poems (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), p. 43. 56 Green, History, p. 65. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid, p. 173. 59 In U. Amarasinghe, Dryden and Pope in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Study of Changing Literary Taste 1800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), U. Amarasinghe quotes a letter from Anna Seward to Scott, ‘I almost grieve that you […] should employ your golden hours in removing the leaden incrustations of former editors’ (p. 9). 60 W. Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. C. Lamont, Introduction by K. Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 384. 61 Scott, Waverley, p. 384.

8 A ‘Piece written by a Lady’ Gender, anonymous authorship and editing The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt At first glance, the knowledgeable reader might infer that our essay ­title, ‘A “Piece written by a Lady”’, must be taken from the title page of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760). After all, many eighteenth-century novelists who chose to remain more or less anonymous adopted the demure eidolon ‘a Lady’ or even ‘a young Lady’, which tantalizingly gestures towards disclosing at least the author’s gender, quality and possibly age – even if this information cannot entirely be credited. Instead, this description of the novel is by its printer, Samuel Richardson, who replied to his friend and correspondent Lady Bradshaigh on 20 June 1760, ‘To this hour, I know not who was the Writer. It was sent me from a Lady of Quality as [a] Piece written by a Lady whom she patronized, with a desire I would get it into the world in as advantageous a Manner, as I could’.1 Despite considerable interest from early readers such as Lady Bradshaigh, Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter, for the past 250 years the author of The Histories has resisted all efforts to identify her: her gender is all we really know. And while Richardson’s hint that the novel is by ‘a Lady’ was essential to getting it republished in the twenty-first century, working with an anonymous text has not only shaped our editorial practice, it has changed the way that we, as critics, approach studying eighteenth-century novels. Our initial interest in The Histories stemmed from its representation of women as suffering but deserving subjects in a patriarchal society: victims of male lust and female spite; failed by the blind and insensitive labour market; and ignored in nuptial law. Buoyed by a resurgence of interest in The Histories, we planned an edition in part to make it available for classroom use. We got some way with the first publisher we approached, but ultimately our reluctance to assign an author in the absence of definitive evidence proved an insurmountable obstacle: apparently the need for readers (and teachers) to have known authors was too great for the publisher to take the risk. When we learned of the

112  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt Chawton House Library Series at Pickering & Chatto, and knowing that the novel was by a woman, if an unidentifiable one, we were animated to pitch the proposal again. We are grateful that the series editors Stephen Bygrave and Stephen Bending were sufficiently forward-thinking to respond as booksellers John Rivington and James Dodsley had done when approached by Richardson in 1759; and we continue to believe that the novel’s intrinsic merits – its sympathetic recasting of the prostitute as victim of social, economic, sexual and legal injustice, its argument for the power of female community and its aesthetic merits as a work of fiction – warranted its (re)publication even without an author’s name on the title page. Initially, of course, we hoped that diligent, sensitive editorial work would solve the attribution conundrum once and for all. As we described in our introduction, the facts are as follows. In January 1759, Lady Barbara Montagu gave the manuscript to Samuel Richardson, indicating that it had been written by a female friend and neighbour of hers in Bath. Richardson printed the novel for Rivington and James Dodsley, after it was initially rejected by Andrew Millar and Robert Dodsley; and Lady Barbara’s brother, the Earl of Halifax, thanked Richardson for his assistance by sending him a haunch of venison, a detail noted by Markman Ellis as evidence that the Montagu family’s sponsorship of the novel ran deep. But as Ellis qualifies, authorizing a novel is not the same as authoring a novel and there is no evidence to suggest that Montagu had a hand in writing any or all of The Histories, even if she might have known its author well.2 Bluestockings Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot read the novel soon after its publication, and each speculated on the identity of its anonymous author. Talbot wrote in a letter to Carter, dated 27 November 1759, that she ‘kn[e]w not who writ’ this ‘pretty book’ but hazarded that it was ‘at least a very good likeness of Mrs [Sarah] Fielding’. 3 Some six years after its publication, Elizabeth Montagu, also in a letter to Carter, revealed herself none the wiser about its authorship, but suspected that it had been ‘chiefly written by your friend Mrs Fielding’.4 Sarah Fielding, we know, was part of the Bath community of which Lady Barbara was an active member. However, so were other women both known and largely obscure to us today. The attribution to Fielding has proved remarkably resilient. Despite Linda Bree’s assertion in her 1996 biography that Fielding was unlikely to have written the novel – in the late 1750s she was battling ill health and the demands of working on two other novels and her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates (1762) – The Histories is still most closely associated with the author of The Adventures of David Simple (1744).5 Most notably, in her influential article ‘Sympathetic Visibility’ (2000), Joyce Grossman concludes in Fielding’s favour on the grounds of ‘stylistic, linguistic and thematic affinities’ between The Histories and

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  113 Fielding’s novels The Countess of Dellwyn (1759) and The History of Ophelia (1760).6 On balance, we find Bree’s argument more convincing, not simply due to its practical sense – the time constraints produced by illness and other projects – but also on more subjective grounds: we find it improbable that Fielding, an established professional novelist, would not have arranged for the novel’s publication herself. In October of 1758, a mere three months before Montagu’s initial inquiry to Richardson, Fielding had negotiated with Millar on her own behalf from her residence in Bath for the sale of The Countess of Dellwyn, and she then wrote to Richardson to organize the printing. If she had written The Histories, it is unlikely at this stage that she would have needed Montagu to intervene. Those, such as Betty Rizzo, who have considered the tantalizing prospect that the novel’s inset narratives might have had multiple authors, have tended to reaffirm Elizabeth Montagu’s suspicion that any collaboration would surely have involved Fielding.7 After all, as Carolyn Woodward has claimed, collaboration was, for the author of The Cry (1754), a ‘natural writing mode’.8 While the possibility exists of The Histories having multiple authors, and certainly its structure of four inset tales told by four different narrators would make the division of authorial labour very neat, we are not comfortable with this solution as it conflicts with those facts that we do know about The Histories’ authorship. Once we begin to ignore the written record – Richardson’s description of Lady Barbara’s approach – and disregard the identification of the author as ‘a Lady’, who is to say that the author was not ‘a Lady’ but a Gentleman, or a mixed group? Stylistic and thematic analysis can do little to answer the questions the sparse facts leave hanging. Like The Histories, Fielding’s fiction explores the devastating reality of female dependence and inadequate education, sexual double standards, the price paid by women for the privileging of economic ambition above affective ties and perhaps pre-eminently the potential of female community to address and transcend these social inequities. The same, however, might be said of much of the fiction by Lady Barbara’s closest friend, Sarah Scott, whose case for consideration as a potential author of The Histories we advanced in the introduction to our edition of the novel.9 When we embarked on our editorial project, we were energized by the possibility that modern digital research techniques, such as searching through the relatively recent and still very exciting ECCO, might allow us to identify distinctive word usage or common plot devices in The Histories and Scott’s or Fielding’s work, providing the smoking gun that scholar detectives had failed to spot for so long. We did discover similarities in language and plotting between Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760) and the fourth penitent’s narrative. For example, both texts contain a description of the wrongly imprisoned heroine’s first

114  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt night in the country. In this quotation from The Histories, the fourth penitent describes the prison in which her husband has confined her: The ground around the house had once been a moat, but was now become a bog, wherein large families of frogs had fixed their abode, and kept a never-ceasing croaking; which made a proper base to the pert chirp of the crickets, who inhabited the chimnies. To the music of these was added the whooting of two owls, who lived in an old yew tree, just under my window, and contended with a neighbouring screech-owl which should most constantly serenade me. All these animals, as if desirous of entertaining the stranger who was just come amongst them, were particularly sonorous the first night; and to complete the whole, the house-dog, unused to be disturbed by the arrival of equipages and horses, was put into such agitation, that he could not recompose his spirits, but howled without ceasing until morning.10 The following quotation from Fielding’s The History of Ophelia employs the same image of a musical performance – a ‘serenade’ or a ‘concert’ – put on by the local wildlife; and it even enumerates the very same animals (the frogs, the owls, the crickets, and the ‘House-Dog’): [At] Twilight our Concert began. The first Performance was a great House-Dog, that would suffer no Noise but his own, incessantly howling or barking. Every Hearth was full of Crickets, who chirped the live long Night, but had none of those lively Notes, which Milton celebrates as the Sound of Mirth. The old Towers of the House were filled with Owls of every Sort, who, by their hoarse Hooting, and their shrill Shrieking, bore no inconsiderable Part of the Concert, of which the Froggery made the Base. These vocal Performers were accompanied by all the Modulations of a bleak Winter’s Wind, which gathering in various Passages of that rambling House, made a continual Whistling, even in the mildest Weather, roared in the Chimneys, and blew in at a thousand Crevices in the shattered Wainscot.11 The similarities between these passages are certainly striking. One seems to be quite obviously the source of the other. But does this establish that they were written by the same person? The most that we can definitely say is that the author of the second novel (chronologically, presumably, this was Ophelia) seems to have had access to the first: Fielding and the author of The Histories both lived in Bath, and it is not unlikely that the women writers in this community shared their work. Beyond that, we cannot conclusively establish through evidence like this that the same woman produced both texts. Ultimately, neither the external

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  115 evidence  nor the additional internal evidence we adduced through the process of editing the novel could enable us to say with any degree of conviction that we could identify the author of The Histories. All we knew then, and all we still know now, is that its author was a woman who lived in Bath. It would be misleading to suggest that we are uninterested in the identity of the novel’s author. Nonetheless, in the absence of explicit evidence to secure an attribution, we were, and remain, more than content to support the author’s original claims that her identity was of secondary importance to her fiction and perhaps even at odds with its ethos. Moreover, as editors, we found the absence of a known author liberating. Although feminist scholarship has long criticized the conflation of women’s lives and their writing, fiction by women writers of the past has, until recently, often been used to confirm what we assume or know about its author (the only recently dislodged accounts of Maria Edgeworth as a Daddy’s girl, or the representation of Charlotte Smith as a reluctant writer who stooped to pen novels only to feed her children, for instance).12 Where these writers’ lives remain partly or largely obscure to us today, fiction is often looked to as a way of accounting for biographical lacunae. Editing a novel without the pressure of a life to which to bind it felt like being let off the hook. Instead of reading the text as an extension or complication of themes and arguments pursued in its author’s other works or as proof of her political investments, we were forced to pursue a more historicist orientation, which would have been our inclination as literary critics in any case. The lack of a biographical figure led us to turn our attention inwards to the text itself. It required us to locate the novel in relation to the dense web of intertextual allusion that we trailed through direct quotation, word use and thematic echoes. It also forced us to look outwards to the historical Magdalen ­Hospital, to examine both the official, male-authored pamphlets that established the plan and merits of the charity and the narrative that has sprung up around it. For example, in his 1917 history of the institution, the Rev. H. F. B. Compston claims that the wards of the hospital were adorned with signs reading, ‘Tell your story to no one’.13 However, this prohibition does not feature in the second edition of The Rules, Orders and Regulations of the Magdalen House (1759), or indeed in any of the other contemporary literature on the charity’s establishment. Instead, The Rules offers inmates the option of concealing their real names and essentially operating anonymously while in the Magdalen Hospital: it states, ‘neither is any enquiry into names or families permitted, but all possibly [sic] discouragement given to every kind of discovery that the parties themselves do not chuse to make’.14 When we were editing the novel, we focused on this detail as a repudiation of the received critical wisdom that the Magdalen Hospital rejected autobiography in its attempt to rehabilitate the penitent prostitutes: clearly, at the time the novel was

116  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt written – immediately after the charity was established – the inhabitants were allowed to tell their stories if they chose to do so (although this may certainly have changed during the nineteenth century, hence Compston’s claim). Now, however, the fact that the hospital’s governors gave the penitents permission to conceal their identities seems much more like an allusion to the power, and the transformative potential, of anonymity. Although we eventually became not only reconciled to, but positively energized by, our inability to assign authorship to the novel, we are forced to acknowledge that the ­‘author-function’, as defined by M ­ ichel Foucault, continues to be one of the key organizing principles of literary history. For eras such as the eighteenth century where anonymous or pseudonymous publication was commonplace, the majority of pertinent scholarship has been driven by the quest for attribution, although recently more work has been done to analyse the persistence of these unsettling authorial practices and their significance for authors and readers.15 There are various reasons why this has been historically the case. First there is the apparently deep-seated psychological need that readers evidently feel to reunite a text with the authorial body that produced it. What spurs that need is not always so clear, however. In the examples of Talbot, Carter and Montagu cited above, curiosity seems partly to have motivated their epistolary speculations, as, apparently, does a desire to assume a privileged, semi-insider knowledge inaccessible to the generality of readers. However, it is important to recognize that, for these women, displaying their familiarity with the literary world goes beyond vanity: it cements their self-identification as readers and scholars, and helps them advance the case that women are the intellectual equals of men. Less obviously evident in these examples, though clearly motivating many others’ will to attribute texts to an identifiable author, is, as Roland Barthes elucidated, the will to gain mastery over the text by deciphering its meaning. Interpreting the text as if it were a code or puzzle to be solved, the goal of reading, according to this model, is ‘to furnish’ a work ‘with a final signified, to close the writing’ in such a way as to secure the critic’s ‘victory’.16 But for feminist scholars, the identification of women writers who went by ‘a Lady’, or ‘the author of’, or by no name at all, the author–text–reader battle is a rather different one than that imagined by Barthes and carries a different political inflection. Attribution has been central to a recovery project that has brought writers of the eighteenth century (and other periods) from the periphery to the centre of our conversations because it has allowed us to talk about the achievements of individual women writers and, in many instances, to chart the longevity of their careers and their often extraordinary versatility. Phebe Gibbes (d.1805), the writer of more than a dozen anonymously published novels and various periodical contributions between the 1760s and 1790s, is a case in point. Although Gibbes’s best-known and quite extraordinary novel Hartley House Calcutta (1789) has long

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  117 attracted at least moderate scholarly interest, she only began to be taken seriously when her authorship of this and many other works was proved through the 1984 microfilm publication of the archive of the Royal Literary Fund, from which she sought financial relief, and literary scholars began to chart the political through-lines of her fiction.17 That there is still so little work on Gibbes’s novels, or on those of her many sister Literary Fund applicants, is in part testimony to the long shadow that anonymous publication still casts over scholarly enquiry today.18 In this context, the first publisher’s rejection of our edition should perhaps not have surprised us as much as it did. As feminist scholars we know that literary history requires heroines for the telling. Where anonymity has played a part in these histories it has often been taken as a sign of the cultural constraints women writers were forced to navigate in their careers. Such accounts imply an impossible contradiction in the expectations of the conduct and demeanour of the domestic woman and professional author that replicate one (but we emphasize only one) thread of the web of discourses surrounding gender and authorship in the eighteenth century. Anonymity in this context becomes a sign of fear, as perhaps it partly was for the anonymous author of Evelina (1778); the novel’s dedication claims that its author wishes to remain anonymous because she ‘would not sink’ her father’s fame through her literary efforts.19 Alternatively, a woman’s refusal to publish under her own name has commonly been viewed as a sign of prudence or modesty, as in the case of Jane Austen, whose name only appeared on her posthumous publications and whose brother Henry, in his lastingly influential ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ for Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), noted that ‘in public’ his sister ‘turned away from any allusion to the character of the authoress’. 20 In her private letters, though, Austen famously expressed her desire for both the ‘praise’ and the ‘Pewter’ that a literary career might generate and her almost proverbial modesty turned to ‘MAD’ness when the manuscript for Northanger Abbey, then titled Susan, languished unpublished on the desk of the short-sighted publishers Crosby and Co. for six years. 21 Real though the pressures could be for eighteenth-century women writers, they could also be, and frequently were, exploited. Anonymity, specifically, could be leveraged for various gains. Frances Burney admitted as much in the address ‘To the Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’ that prefaces Evelina when she wrote, ‘Without name, without recommendation’ to whom could she more ‘properly apply for patronage as to those who publicly profess themselves Inspectors of all literary performances?’22 An anonymous nobody like her heroine – whose right to bear her father’s name is a point of dispute throughout the novel – the modest young author appealed to the gallantry of male reviewers in a highly calculated request for ‘protection’ from criticism. Gibbes also strategically represented her decision to publish her fiction anonymously.

118  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt Using her refusal to put her name to her novels as evidence that she was a ‘domestic woman’ of a ‘withdrawing turn of temper’, Gibbes made several successful claims on the Royal Literary Fund’s generosity, although ironically she had to enjoin Joseph Johnson to confirm her authorship of her novel Elfrida (1786) before the charity would release any monies. 23 For other writers, as Margaret Ezell has eloquently demonstrated, soubriquets such as ‘by a Lady’ served less as ‘disguise’ or mode of feminine conciliation than as ‘a costume’, ‘a means to signify to the reader that a certain type of role was being performed, a personality was being staged, rather than being simply a way to hide the true identity of the individual’. 24 After all, as Ezell notes, the ‘very existence’ of works published under the pseudonym ‘by a Lady’ ‘subvert[s] the assumption that women must not speak as women’. 25 Indeed, Ezell speculates that this gendered anonymity could have been deliberately used by male authors as a deliberate strategy, perhaps to win or to reassure female readers or their guardians (male and female), but perhaps even more intriguingly to place their novels’ arguments within contemporary discourse on constructions of gender. Ezell’s arguments are unexpectedly pertinent for understanding some of the many ways that anonymity functions in The Histories. It would be all too easy to assume that the novel’s author did not wish to identify herself because of its sensitive subject matter and, therefore, to read it as a conventional anonymity that served as an expedient disguise. There is insufficient evidence to indicate whether or not this was the case. Its readers did, however, know from the novel’s full title that its author was not one of its narrators: its stories are The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House, As Supposed to Be Related by Themselves. The narratives may appear to issue from the mouths of their four, quite different, tellers, but they are the product of the author’s pen. Like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), but unlike Pamela (1740), which Richardson tried to pass off as the original correspondence of its fictional protagonist, both of which were published anonymously, the penitents’ stories are appropriately dressed up by a third party for readers. Yet, despite the fact that the novel’s title goes to some lengths to assert its status as a work of fiction – as a series of ‘probable’ tales communicated by an author whose life experience is very different from that of her fallen protagonists – its contents work hard to make readers forget this fact. 26 The prominent ‘I’ of the novel’s preface – a rhetorical tour de force written after the manuscript had been submitted, and at the suggestion of Richardson – asserts her presence in order to prepare readers for her apparent disappearance in the pages that follow. After introducing her hopes for her work – ‘if […] I shall incline any woman so effectually to pity the frailty of one of her own sex, as to forgive the past, […] I shall esteem myself extremely happy’ – the author proceeds to declare herself a seeming irrelevance. 27 ‘Novels’, she concludes, ‘should

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  119 be wrote and read as books which are to teach the moral by the facts, where precept is enlivened by examples’.28 In the moral economy of fiction, in other words, the identity of its author can only be a distraction. Anonymity has a didactic function that goes above and beyond providing a cloak for the author. It is important to note that eighteenth-century readers, however interested they might have been in decoding an author’s identity, would have been accustomed to encountering an unattributed work. In his bibliography of the mid-to-late eighteenth-century novel, James Raven finds that between 1759 and 1790 about 80 per cent of the novels published were anonymous; in 1759 (the year The Histories was printed), more than half of them were anonymous, with a further eight novels assigned to a male and five to a female author; in 1760 (the year on The Histories’ title page), twenty-four anonymous novels were published, with only eleven assigned to known authors (six male and five female).29 A mid-century reader of novels, therefore, would not necessarily have instinctively viewed a new fiction as a biographical lens through which to investigate the life or convictions of its author. The significance of this aspect of reception history has yet to be thoroughly investigated, as we are still mired in an anachronistic focus on the author. However, we believe that the critical tendency to take autobiography as a point of departure obscures the achievement of The Histories’ author, which is to adopt the far-from-exceptional anonymity and transform it, giving the lack of biographical signifiers a didactic and an artistic purpose. It creates an identification between the (innocent) author – as her preface is at pains to inform us – and her (fallen) heroines. One of the striking features of the text is that the four metafictional narrators are virtually nameless: two of them – the tellers of the second and fourth tales – never even provide a Christian name; the other two do indicate briefly that they are Emily (the heroine of the first story) and Fanny (narrator of the third). But these labels are used sparingly, especially in comparison with other eighteenth-century heroines who relentlessly play with and around their names (Pamela and Evelina immediately come to mind). Indeed, as editors we were forced to decide how we would refer to the penitents when working on and writing about the text. For example, we rejected the critical contrivance of using their husbands’ names to refer to the heroines of the second and fourth stories: this is inaccurate in the case of the second penitent (she is not in fact legally married, which is the crux of her tale) and grossly inappropriate in the case of the fourth penitent (whose escape from her abusive husband to establish a domestic unit with her lover is a major plot point). In the end, we settled on referring to these women chronologically, as ‘the first penitent’, ‘the second penitent’ and so on. It has only occurred to us while writing this essay that we should have made more of the structural affinity between the author and her

120  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt creations produced by their shared anonymity. This works on multiple levels. It erases the distinction between the fallen prostitutes and their historian (and by implication the readers themselves), and this contributes to rehabilitating the figure of the prostitute. She is transformed from the appetitive whore, made infamous by novels such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), into an unfortunate or misguided individual who may be retrieved through institutional charities like the ­Magdalen Hospital itself, or more simply through a more charitable attitude from her fellow human beings: as the author asks in the preface, ‘Shall we then refuse […] our pardon and assistance to those, who may not more properly be termed fellow-creatures, than fellow-­ sinners, because their offences are of a deeper dye than our own?’30 This identification between the anonymous author and the anonymous penitents also works if we assign a gender to the author – ­although obviously its effect is quite different if we assume the author to be male or female – and we suspect this is quite deliberate. Although modern readers know the history of Lady Barbara Montagu’s exchange with Richardson and therefore that the author was ‘a Lady of Quality’, the novel’s first readers did not. Indeed, the Monthly Review apparently assumed the author was male.31 We believe that this is an intentional effect, created to emphasize the author’s point that blame for the creation of prostitutes, and therefore for the persistence of prostitution in British society, should be laid at the door of those who seduce young women, reducing their worth on the marriage and labour markets, making it impossible for them to support themselves except through the only trade they have known: in sex. As the author explains in the preface, I fear that [prostitution] is a vice that can never be suppressed, while he, who seduces a woman into guilt and shame, and abandons her to disease and poverty, obtains no other appellation by such villainy, than that of a man of gallantry.32 By leaving open the possibility that the author is male, ‘his’ rejection of this valorization of seduction becomes all the more powerful – and potentially all the more persuasive for male readers. However, if we assume the author to be female, the erasure of distance between the author and the penitents has an entirely different charge, and one so electric we as editors find it impossible not to interpret it as further evidence of the author’s femininity. In our introduction, we argue that the novel champions sorority – a female ‘society’ bound by the penitents’ ‘mutual affection’– as an antidote to the mercenary self-­ interestedness of all those who conspire in the women’s downfall: the men who seduce them and the women who act as agents of patriarchy and ostracize them. 33 This sense of sorority is then reinforced if the female community extends outside the intradiegetic space and spills over,

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  121 creating a bond that unites the author with her creations and her female readers. Their misfortunes become her misfortunes, and ours; their errors become her (potential) errors, and ours. The perilous situation of women in society is writ large. But then we must consider metaphoric as well as literal prostitution. In her discussion of embedded tales as a significant feature of ‘Later Fiction’ in eighteenth-century women’s writing, Katherine Binhammer argues, ‘I read these scenes of storytelling as intentional metafictions employed by women writers to mirror the discursive and material conditions authorizing women’s voices.’34 If the anonymous narrators’ journeys – seduced by the men they trusted, betrayed by the women who could have helped retrieve them, forced to sell their bodies for subsistence before turning in a final desperate hour to the Magdalen Hospital – are interpreted as reflections of the anonymous author’s intellectual and creative journey – vulnerable to the accusation of prostitution for selling her words, the products of her body – then the text exposes more than the precarious socio-economic position of women in patriarchal society. It also reveals how women writers are scorned, mocked, forced upon pitiful or inadequate contrivances to allow their words to be heard. The shared anonymity of penitents and author thus creates an affinity between them that is a political gesture, effacing the individual within the collective, and undeserved, suffering of the female many. It is only through editing this anonymous text that we as female critics have begun to appreciate its sophistication; by being forced to abandon the fantasy that we would be able to decode the identity of The Histories’ author, we have begun to recognize the limitations that a biographical focus places on editors, and the freedom to engage with the text and its author’s artistry that anonymity generates.

Notes 1 Forster Collection, The National Art Library, FM XI, ff. 268–9. 2 M. Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 178–9. 3 A Series of Letters between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot, from the Year 1741 to 1770, 2 vols (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1808), vol. 1, p. 448. 4 E. Montagu to E. Carter, 22 September 1765, Montagu Collection, The Huntington Library, MO3154. 5 Bree’s argument has been supported more recently by P. Sabor in his introduction to Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 10; and K. Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 191, n. 16. 6 J. Grossman, ‘“Sympathetic Visibility”: Social Reform and the English Woman Writer: The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House’, Women’s Writing, 7:2 (2000), pp. 247–66, on p. 250.

122  Jennie Batchelor and Megan Hiatt 7 B. Rizzo, ‘Two Versions of Community: Montagu and Scott’, in N. Pohl and B. A. Schellenberg (eds), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2003), pp. 193–214, on p. 207, n. 28. 8 C. Woodward, ‘The Modern Figure of the Author, Sarah Fielding and the Case of The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House’, English, 58:223 (2009), pp. 278–96. 9 J. Batchelor and M. Hiatt, Introduction, in J. Batchelor and M. Hiatt (eds), The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), pp. ix–xxiii, on pp. xxi–ii. 10 The Histories, p. 160. All references are to this edition. 11 Fielding, History of Ophelia, ed. P. Sabor, p. 171. 12 See, for instance, on Burney, E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth & Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). On the persistence of accounts that seek to present Smith as a reluctant author, see J. Batchelor, Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 67–107. 13 Rev. H. F. B. Compston, The Magdalen Hospital: The Story of a Great London Charity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917), p. 199. 14 [Anon.], The Rules, Orders and Regulations of the Magdalen House, for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes, 2nd edn (London: W. Faden, 1760), p. 19. 15 Some notable scholarly exceptions which actively resist the tendency towards attribution include R. J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); R. J. Griffin, ‘Anonymity and Authorship’, New Literary History, 30:4 (1999), pp. 877–95; J. Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 2007); and E. Henriksen, ‘Editing Anonymous’, in A. Hollinshead Hurley and C. Goodblatt (eds), Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 175–88. 16 R. Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, repr. in D. Lodge and N. Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 315–16. 17 Germane to this development was the entry on Gibbes that appeared in V. Blain, P. Clements and I. Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 420. 18 On early women applicants to the Royal Literary Fund, see Batchelor, Women’s Work, pp. 144–84. 19 F. Burney, Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. E. A. Bloom, with an Introduction and Notes by V. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3. All references are to this edition. 20 H. Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, repr. in K. Sutherland (ed.), A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 140. 21 Jane Austen to Fanny Knight, 30 November 1814, repr. in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. D. Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 287; Jane Austen to Crosby and Co., 5 April 1809, pp. 174–5. 22 Burney, Evelina, p. 5. 23 P. Gibbes to the Royal Literary Fund, 14 October 1804; and J. Johnson to the Royal Literary Fund, 15 October 1804. RLF Case 74. Reel 2.

A ‘Piece written by a Lady’  123 24 M. J. M. Ezell, ‘“By a Lady”: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture’, in The Faces of Anonymity, pp. 63–79, on p. 64. 25 Ezell, “By a Lady”, p. 77. 26 The Histories, p. 3. 27 Ibid., p. 4. 28 Ibid., p. 8. 29 J. Raven, ‘The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830’, in The Faces of Anonymity, pp. 141–66. 30 The Histories, p. 5. 31 The review opens thus: ‘We cannot but applaud the author of these stories for his conscious ingenuity’ [our italics]. Monthly Review, 21 November 1759, p. 450. 32 The Histories, p. 6. 33 Ibid., p. 10. 34 K. Binhammer, ‘Later Fictions’, in C. Ingrassia (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 180–195, on p. 189.

9 ‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’? Editing women’s court memoirs Amy Culley

Women’s court memoirs of the Regency period could inspire hostile reactions in their early readership, as epitomized by the furore surrounding Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth on its publication in 1838. The Times identified her sources as ‘the foul tittle-tattle of the sweepings of the Princess of Wales’s bed-­chamber or dressing-room’ and the Diary was regarded as an act of ‘abominable treachery’ for which ‘our language has no sufficient epithet of censure’ by the Quarterly Review.1 It also provoked Henry Brougham’s essay on the ‘Abuses of the Press’ in the Edinburgh Review and was dismissed by the Athenaeum as a work that on ‘every page’ provides ‘some ­uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’. 2 For these nineteenth-­century readers, Bury’s Diary was an unseemly (if fascinating) violation of privacy that revivified Regency scandals perhaps best forgotten in the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation. But for a twenty-first century editor, engaged in reviving such ‘uncalled-for’ works for a contemporary readership, court memoirs present rather different pains and pleasures on which this essay reflects. Editing court memoirs provides a welcome opportunity to explore the interactions of women’s life writing texts with the social, political, literary and commercial contexts of their day. Such work also invites us to reconsider women’s experiments with pseudonymous and anonymous authorship and the relationship between gender and genre in order to address the implications of this for editorial practice. Furthermore, tracing the processes of textual transmission of these works, from the early nineteenth century to the present day, highlights the contingency of the editorial process and the influences of a critical and cultural moment on editions of women’s writing within a broader history of recovery. My editions of Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth (1838) and Catherine Cary’s Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary (1825) were published as part of the Chawton House Library Series: Women’s Memoirs, and appeared in facsimile with a general introduction, headnotes and endnotes. 3 Bury’s Diary was last published in 1908 and Cary’s Memoirs had not been republished since its first appearance in print. These works present a personalized portrait of the court

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  125 and recount their authors’ involvement in the acrimonious marriage of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick that reached its height during the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820. Establishing a series on the basis of genre, rather than an author-centred collected works, enables Bury and Cary to find a place within a history of women’s writing which, in recent years, has broadened its generic focus beyond fiction and poetry to recognize the diversity of women’s literary practices.4 The series testifies to the ‘remarkable capaciousness’ and ‘creative permeability’ of the memoir, which prompted editorial work to situate the texts within multiple generic contexts and in relation to a variety of literary modes. 5 In this company, Bury and Cary appear less as anomalous eccentrics and more as participants in a neglected, hybrid genre that combined personal history with social and political commentary, travel writing, Gothic scandal and sentiment, and incorporated authenticating documents such as correspondence and press reports within an autobiographical text.6 The general introduction was therefore designed to locate these works within the social and political landscape of the Queen Caroline Affair and the Regency court and to establish Bury and Cary within a history of women’s life writing while, at the same time, remaining alert to the generic fluidity of the form. As works deeply intermeshed with their times and disruptive of conventional ideas of authorial agency, the court memoir seemed best served by the social approach to editing associated with new textualism and the work of Jerome J. McGann. For McGann, the focus of an editor is not authorial intent emphasizing an author’s ‘life and works’, but rather the interactions of a text with its social and cultural locations over time.7 At first glance, the memoir form would seem to invite editorial emphasis on the life of the author as a ‘contingent’ or ‘attached’ genre in its investment in the writer’s connection to the text.8 But the works of both Cary and Bury play with authorial identity, deploy anonymity and pseudonymity self-reflexively as textual strategies and use paratextual materials that raise more questions than they answer. They are also characterized by publication histories that complicate their place within a history of female authorship. Editors of early modern women’s writing have led the way in reflecting on and theorizing the problems of editing anonymous or pseudonymous publications by women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this scholarship was particularly valuable for thinking about Cary and Bury.9 The metaphors we use to describe the practice of editing implicitly suggest the roles we imagine for ourselves in our relationships with texts and readers; an editor of court memoirs can seem like a detective or code-breaker. The court memoirs deliberately obscure identities of historical figures in the style of the roman à clef and immerse themselves in scandal, court machinations and political factionalism. However, I would argue that these texts have not lost an original clarity that is in need of restoration and recovery by an editor, but were always obscure

126  Amy Culley and obfuscating as a deliberate strategy and source of reading pleasure. Rather than a reason for editorial despair, then, attending to the doubts and uncertainties of these works offers a richer (if messier) picture of women’s place within eighteenth-century print culture and enhances the histories that we write. Suzanne Gossett comments that through her choice of text to edit, her introduction and commentary notes, and even, though more rarely, through her textual decisions, a feminist editor can do a great deal to affect what we think we know about the literature(s) of our tradition(s).10 In this spirit, these texts were read in dialogue with existing critical narratives of gender and genre, female authorship and literary periodization to consider what their recovery might do to complicate ‘what we think we know’.

Catherine Cary’s Memoirs: secrets, lies and pseudonyms The Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary (1825) is a work in which disguise is central to the identity of both the author and her subjects. ‘Miss C. E. Cary’ remains shrouded in obscurity and the Memoirs seems to be her only foray into print. Michelle Levy has recently argued that a fuller history of women’s writing will need to take into account authors who ‘made only a single, transitory appearance in print’, which is especially common in memoir-writing.11 Such a commitment will require editors and scholars to deal with texts like Cary’s, which asks to be read as the work of a female author, but raises the question of whether we are reading a memoir written by a woman, or the exploitation of the scandalous memoir form by a male author for whom writing as a woman was an effective rhetorical, political or commercial strategy. Cary appears in Women in Context: Two Hundred Years of British Women Autobiographers, but her entry states that the narrative is ‘so full of improbable events that the book’s authorship should be questioned’, evoking the twin possibilities of pseudonymous authorship and fictionalization.12 In contrast to Bury’s Diary, which was widely discussed in periodicals and fashionable circles, the lack of contemporary commentary on Cary’s Memoirs makes it difficult to assess how readers responded to the work. Research into the publisher, T. Traveller, and the enigmatic portrait of the frontispiece claiming to be Cary, also offers little insight.13 Biographical information therefore comes solely from the Memoirs itself and while Cary seems to have been born around 1793, the narrative withholds dates, locations and names in its highly convoluted plot.14 She identifies herself as the daughter of a Catholic Duke whose birth was kept secret and claims that her early life was spent in a French convent, from which she escaped to Ireland and then to London. Erin Henriksen’s insight that

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  127 early modern texts of uncertain and unknown authorship ‘offer a valuable lesson to editors that the category of authorship includes much more than the personal name of the writer’ therefore seems particularly apposite to Cary.15 The instability of identity animates Cary’s text not only in its authorship but also as part of its plot, as the writer is positioned within a network of acts of forgery, misattribution, disguise, deception and slander. Cary’s Memoirs therefore concurs with the sentiment expressed in the opening of Bury’s Diary that ‘courts are strange, mysterious places’, in a narrative that claims to bring to light secret plots surrounding Queen Caroline and Princess Charlotte, only to entangle the reader further in fiction and fact.16 Cary purports to have become involved with the Queen’s party on Caroline’s return to England in 1820, when she was appointed to serve under Lady Anne Hamilton (a lady-in-waiting). She recalls that as part of her royal duties she had been required to copy recriminatory documents designed to implicate Queen Charlotte in a plot which had led to the death of Caroline’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, in 1817. It was alleged that the princess, who had died in childbirth, probably from a haemorrhage, had been poisoned. Cary claims that Caroline’s supporters, led by Alderman Wood and Lady Anne Hamilton, intended to publish these forged documents in order to discredit George IV and his government, cause general insurrection and promote the cause of Catholic emancipation against a ministry hostile to reform. This fantastic plot and its confusing complexities (many more than there is space to elaborate here) seem closer to fiction than history, and Cary draws extensively on Gothic and sentimental tropes as a virtuous heroine in distress. Throughout she is the victim of mistaken identity and foregrounds her vulnerable status as a woman without a family name and subject to ‘the tongue of slander’.17 The preface provides an opaque address to a reader, in its struggles between ‘the conflicting desire of promulgating truth, and of withholding an unnecessary exposure of persons and facts’.18 Cary writes to vindicate her character and calls on ‘that liberty which the laws of my country allow to every subject’.19 Yet despite the claims to authenticity and legitimacy, the Memoirs also seems to operate as a work of blackmail and extortion, falsely promising (or threatening) a second edition, which never materialized, that will ‘bring forward parties to public notice, and publish facts, with, at least, ninety names’. 20 This is a familiar strategy in the scandalous memoir tradition, exemplified by The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written by Herself (1825) that was published serially in the same year and also threatens to reveal a ‘few more high characters in reserve’ in later volumes that were never produced. 21 In a tantalizing address, Cary’s preface concludes: ‘I shall, therefore, despise all those who know nothing of me except by name; and who, therefore, know me not at all.’22 But despite the improbabilities of Cary’s claims, my investigation did produce brief glimpses of this shadowy

128  Amy Culley figure outside of the Memoirs. The Howard Bury papers contain thirteen letters relating to the alleged poisoning plot that date from 1817–25, apparently transcribed from correspondence between Queen Charlotte, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield (the Prince Regent’s private secretary) and Sir Richard Croft. Within this collection is a ‘Copy letter from Miss C. E. Cary to J. J. D.’ in which the writer notes enigmatically: ‘I have already resigned to the government every paper I had which I considered in any way affecting his Majesty or his government’ and that ‘it is my full intention soon to set the public mind at rest upon many things.’23 In addition to this manuscript source, the allegations are repeated in the Secret History of the Court of England (1832), doubtfully attributed to Lady Anne Hamilton. The Secret History claims that a ‘young person’ (whose story mirrors Cary’s) wrote to one of the Queen’s ladies regarding important documents in her possession. 24 However, unlike the Memoirs, the Secret History reprints the letters as genuine evidence that ‘prove that the Princess Charlotte’s death was premeditated’. 25 Other potential sightings of Cary include references to ‘Mrs Carey’, who was prosecuted for trafficking offices as part of the Mary Anne Clarke affair. 26 These traces do not resolve the question of Cary’s identity, but they do establish the outlandish claims of the Memoirs within an intricate web of court machinations and conspiracy theories of the 1820s. The significance of royal sexual scandals for popular culture, radical and loyalist politics and gender debates in the period has been the focus of scholarly attention and Cary’s Memoirs is enriched by reading it in dialogue with these sources. 27 For instance, Cary’s self-representation as the victim of a corrupt aristocracy in a tale of melodrama and Gothic romance seems to replicate the strategies of popular representations of Queen Caroline herself, as explored by Thomas Laqueur and others. 28 Furthermore, locating the Memoirs against the broader political landscape of the Catholic question that dominated British politics during the 1820s illuminates its plot twists, such as the Catholic aristocratic father who subjects Cary to a near-incestuous encounter, or the nightmarish incarceration in a French convent (both incidents written in the style of a Gothic novel). It also helps to unpack the claim in the preface ‘that since the Catholic bill was rejected, numerous copies of the forgeries exposed in this publication, have been circulated in Ireland, in order to inflame the minds of the disaffected and incredulous, which might terminate in bloodshed’. 29 Bills for Catholic Emancipation were defeated in the Lords in 1821, 1822 and 1825 (just prior to the publication of the Memoirs). Cary argues that the conspiracy to incriminate Queen Charlotte in the poisoning of her granddaughter was an attempt by supporters of Queen Caroline (predominantly Whigs and proponents of Catholic emancipation) to discredit the Regent, Lord Liverpool and his ministry, and thus undermine opposition to Catholic reform. By proving that the documents in support of the recrimination were falsified (inadvertently by herself),

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  129 Cary positions her Memoirs as a defence of the realm against a Catholic threat. The text therefore suggests how a personal history might be read as an intervention in social, cultural and political debates, and as a contribution to the historical record, rather than as an individualized form of self-expression or scandalous self-revelation. To consider the mysteries of the text’s authorship is to dwell, at least for now, in a state of ‘editorial “negative capability”’, but such uncertainty is a useful reminder of how flexible our critical histories and acts of recovery need to be in order to encompass the diverse authorial strategies of the period. 30

Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary: paratexts, annotations and editors By contrast, Lady Charlotte Bury (1775–1861) was a well-known (if now largely forgotten) figure, but in her playfulness with authorial identity, paratexts, textual blanks and annotations, she has much in common with her more shadowy counterpart. Born into literary circles in Edinburgh and appointed as lady-in-waiting to the future Queen Caroline in December 1809, Bury left her position at court in May 1815 as one of the last of Caroline’s English attendants abroad and she was called as a witness for the defence at the Queen’s trial for adultery in 1820. Prior to the publication of the Diary in 1838, her association with elite society was reinforced by her status as a prolific writer of fashionable novels of the silver fork school. The publication history of the Diary is entirely consistent with a work premised on acts of revelation and disguise. Bury’s granddaughter made the unlikely claim in 1904 that the Diary was published without Bury’s consent, declaring that her second husband, Edward Bury, had stolen the manuscript from her desk and sold it to the bookseller Henry Colburn. 31 But Edward Bury died in 1832, six years before the Diary’s publication. It seems more persuasive that Bury developed a relationship with Colburn as a writer of fiction and in her troubled financial circumstances after the death of her husband and with a large family to support she was attracted by the profits of publication, since Colburn allegedly offered a thousand pounds for the Diary on seeing only a few pages. 32 Intriguingly, the work was first published anonymously and presents the author as a ‘Lord’ throughout. The plot thickens in the Diary’s use of paratexts as the reader is confronted with an ‘Advertisement’ that claims the ‘editor who first undertook to prepare it for the press’ attempted to ‘disguise – by assuming the masculine style in the Journal’ – that the text was in fact ‘written by a female’. 33 In practice, most of the Diary’s reviewers identified Bury as the author and as her own ‘editor’, including the Literary Gazette owned by her publisher. Commentators highlighted the ineptitude of her disguise, exemplified by the Quarterly Review’s assertion that it was done with ‘superlative gaucherie and most transparent absurdity’. 34

130  Amy Culley The role of the editor is not, then, to accurately attribute this ‘anonymous’ work, which seems to have been widely recognized as Bury’s from the outset, but rather to suggest how we might read her anonymity as ‘a rich authorial device’. 35 Positioning Bury’s anonymous authorship within the feminized literary tradition of amatory fiction, secret history, roman à clef and scandalous memoirs, it seems less like ‘absurdity’ and more like an exploitation of the power of the open secret in its association with the feminine. On encountering Bury’s Diary, Lady Morgan declared that ‘since the publication of the New Atlantis [sic] by Mrs. Manley […] such a book has not been seen, written, nor read’, while the Quarterly Review identified it as ‘the most scandalous publication – we do not except those of Mrs. Manly [sic], George Anne ­B ellamy, or Harriet Wilson – that has ever disgraced English, or, as far as we know, European literature.’36 Contemporary readers were perhaps more alert than literary scholars to the resemblances between Bury and female authors of an earlier era, such as Delarivier Manley. We have generally been slow to trace lines of connection in women’s writing across traditional literary periods or to consider the ways in which experiments with the roman à clef or silver fork fiction of the early nineteenth century look back to semi-autobiographical forms in amatory fiction, secret histories, scandalous memoirs and female appeal memoirs of the eighteenth century. Bringing a writer like Bury back into focus suggests the importance of aristocratic authorship and the authority women writers might discover in gossip, wit and proximity to the Regency court, while also combining this with sympathetic and sentimental modes. In an alleged conversation that takes place between the author (a ‘Lord’) and a female ‘friend’ on what ‘my sex think of a female authoress’, the female ‘friend’ provides a lengthy defence, which concludes in a sentimental register:37 There are many other reasons which instigate women to become authors. It is not, as you falsely accuse us, vanity, or the thirst after notoriety, which prompts the deed, but it is generally one of two things – perhaps both together – either poverty, or the aching desire to be appreciated and understood, even though it may be by some being whom we shall never see in this world. 38 Despite the layers of obfuscation (the voice of the female friend, reported in the Diary of a Lord, recognized by readers as a false conceit, in an ‘anonymous’ publication), it is difficult not to read this moment as a self-vindication and sympathetic appeal on the challenges of female authorship reminiscent of the female appeal memoir.39 The court memoir places particular demands on editorial annotation, due to its referential aesthetic and emphasis on contemporary gossip. The majority of annotations for Bury (and Cary) involved the identification

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  131 of historical figures, particularly those whose identities were tantalizingly hinted at through the use of initials and blanks in accordance with the conventions of the roman à clef. Bury’s early editor defended her in 1839 by claiming that the events she recounts have ‘been the subject of table-talk in every society and every newspaper for the last forty years; and what breach of private confidence is there in narrating the “on dits” of the day?’40 But this immersion in the intimate details of scandals (the significance of which are no longer alive in the popular imagination) means that annotation is required to make explicit cultural knowledge which was implicit for its contemporary readers, and to reconstruct the social web of relationships in which these texts operated. The Diary provides voyeuristic pleasures for readers keen to identify celebrated figures of high life and yet also makes claims for its modesty and discretion. The Edinburgh Review was unimpressed by the ‘stupid affectation of initials and dashes’ which were regarded as ‘another trick to give mystery and pique curiosity’ before ‘a circumstance is added that at once fills up the blank.’41 The task of annotation is further complicated in Bury’s case by the presence of an ‘editor’ within the original printed work, who provides footnotes commenting on the Diary entries. Reviewers were no more convinced by the claim that an ‘editor’ or ‘compiler’ wrote the footnotes than they were that the author was a Lord, and it was generally assumed that Bury was both diarist and editor.42 The Athenaeum’s remarks tease out something of the ironies and contradictions created by the notes: Sometimes, scandals are related with a cool cynicism, that looks like inapprehensiveness, in others the text is corrected by a Mrs. Candour-like annotation from the soi-disant editor, which, though it makes the matter worse than before, at the same time betrays a full consciousness of the impropriety of the revelation.43 The annotations also offered rich potential for satire, inspiring a parody of the Diary in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘Passages from the Diary of the Late Dolly Duster; With Elucidations, Notes, Etc., by Various Eds’.44 The parody includes four ‘editors’ and one ‘compiler’ and an abundance of footnotes in which various editors comment on each other’s interventions. But while the footnotes were a source of criticism and comedy to some, interacting with the text as its editor inspired me to more carefully consider Bury’s footnotes as a literary device that provided insight into the work’s composition and the contingency of the diary form. It also helped to reframe my thoughts on anonymity and the ways it might be read, not simply as aristocratic or gendered reticence but rather a strategy which avoids ‘reducing a text’s possible pluralities to a singularity’, opening up the idea of multiple authorship or a division within the writing subject.45

132  Amy Culley In contrast to Cary’s intervention in the politics of the 1820s, Bury’s Diary was published over twenty years after the events it describes and through the use of footnotes she is able to become the annotator and editor of her former self. Shari Benstock notes that footnotes are often ‘afterwords’ that ‘allow the writer to step outside the critical discourse and comment on it from a perspective that may be different from (and in a voice that may be separate from) that established in the text’.46 Bury’s notes serve multiple and, at times, contradictory purposes, to create a contrapuntal effect. They enable Bury to increase the work’s commercial appeal by supplementing the portraits of fashionable figures with anecdotes and hinting at obscured identities. With the benefit of hindsight she is able to revise, moderate or reinforce former opinions, and discuss celebrated individuals such as the Lord Dudley who ‘promised much, performed little, and died mad’.47 She reflects on changing social mores, lamenting in an acerbic tone on one occasion ‘High Breeding – the term is nearly obsolete, it requires a long and learned note, – and then would not be understood. – ED.’48 The notes extend her biographical reflections on the conduct and character of Queen Caroline in a mixture of judgement and sympathy exemplified by her remark that ‘if ever woman was goaded to intemperate display of passion, the Princess was that woman’.49 She also offers a commentary on the Queen’s letters in terms of their extraordinary orthography, commending Caroline’s ‘feeling’ and ‘truth’ but acknowledging an ‘ignorance’ of grammar. 50 She provides curious justifications for her own moral conduct in the third person, responding to the suggestion in one of Caroline’s letters that her daughter should become the Queen’s ‘bedchamber woman’ in Italy with the exclamation ‘what an idea, to suppose any mother would allow their daughter, especially so young a person […] to accept such a situation.’51 In addition, her portrait of the Queen is located in relation to public perceptions through incorporating press reports and other published accounts in a reminder of the ways in which this personal narrative interacts with events in the public sphere. From the perspective of women’s literary history, the most rewarding footnotes are those relating to the works and reputations of female authors, including Bury’s warm praise of Madame De Staël (‘of no sex’ in ‘all that pertained to mind’) and Mary Berry (who ‘combines all the tact of woman’s feeling, with the strength and terseness ascribed to male intellect alone’). 52 She also presents more forthright discussions of the gender politics of her day in the footnotes than she does in the main body of the text, including the insight that ‘a woman who has any pretence to intellectual power, has much to endure, however modestly or discreetly she may exercise it’. 53 In becoming her own ‘editor’, Bury anticipates the voices of subsequent editors and their relationships with her original text. Tracing the interactions of women’s texts with their earlier editors is part of a feminist practice that seeks to explore how power has been exerted over the

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  133 text and continues to be so by examining the editorial accretions that develop over time. As Michelle Warren suggests, ‘even “unreliable” editions […] have important stories to tell about ideological appropriations and political histories’. 54 In the case of Bury, following the anonymous publication of the Diary in 1838, a ‘new’ edition appeared in 1839 (still without identifying the author explicitly). It provided readers with two new volumes and a preface written by John Galt, a Scottish writer who had worked with Colburn and whose prolific output included a biography of Byron and his own autobiography. In further complications of provenance, the 1839 edition ends with a ‘postscript’ by the publisher informing the reader of the death of Galt (he had been in poor health following a stroke in 1832), but offering to present the original manuscript of the preface to anyone wishing to authenticate it. The preface was written in dialogue with the periodical press and seeks to defend Bury’s text against ‘clever pamphlets and reviews’.55 It suggests that the artlessness of the work (written by many hands and not intended for publication) guarantees its authenticity, and offers fulsome praise of the intimate and balanced portrait of the Queen and non-partisan presentation of contemporary politicians. He positions the work alongside ‘all the Diaries that ever were compiled, collected, or written’ (singling out the diary of Walter Scott and Thomas Moore’s Life of Byron (1831) in particular) as ‘shreds and patches of the times’.56 The preface is optimistic in imagining the relationship of Bury’s Diary with its subsequent readers: ‘A future generation will, however, give to the Diary an impartial award; and it will undoubtedly remain a standard work for historians to refer to, as “notes” to future memoirs of the time of which it treats.’57 If we might read cultural attitudes through the way a period edits its texts, as Isobel Grundy suggests, then this defensive preface in 1839 offers insight into a live debate regarding the publication of private intimacies, the status of the diary form and its contribution to historiography, as well as the relationship between the early Victorians and their ‘disreputable’ ancestors.58 Kathryn Sutherland argues that editorial activity has been ‘reformulated’ in recent years to recognize that editions are ‘contingent critical acts’.59 A comparison between the 1839 edition and its reappearance in 1908 shows a shift in editorial approach in relation to changing historical and cultural contexts. The later text was published as part of a more widespread interest in Regency women by early twentieth-­ century scholars under the title of The Diary of a Lady in Waiting and includes an introduction by editor and historian, A. Francis Steuart. This time Bury’s name appears clearly on the cover, closing down the original complexities of authorial identity and gender. But she is a forgotten figure and Steuart provides a biographical introduction, which establishes her as part of the social and literary elite that includes Matthew Lewis and Walter Scott. He charts her involvement with Queen

134  Amy Culley Caroline, her literary career as a writer of fashionable novels, and outlines the Diary’s publication history and critical reception. The argument for the Diary’s cultural significance is made on the basis of its contribution to social history, in line with Galt’s aspiration in 1839 that it would provide ‘“notes” to future memoirs of the time’, and its use by William Thackeray in The Four Georges (1861), amongst others, is duly noted. There is some impulse toward editorial transparency in Steuart’s explanation of his practice of filling in the blanks of Bury’s roman à clef where possible from ‘old annotated copies’.60 This is justified on the basis that ‘now that so long has elapsed since the Diary was first given to the world this can do no harm’ and anxieties regarding privacy seem to have been defused by the passage of time.61 Steuart’s amendment to Bury’s text is extended in his decision to remove the ‘horrible italics and many of the unnecessary and disgusting original notes, which perhaps were inspired by Colburn or John Galt, and the unnecessary account of the “Public Characters” and the “Regency and Reign of George IV”’.62 The motivation here seems to be to restore the text to an original purity, freeing the Diary from the corrupting influence of Bury’s publisher and editor. But in ‘tidying up’ the text, Steuart also obscures its intricacies as a work that testifies to the contingency of a diary that evolves over time and seems to have been subject to hasty and confused publication. Without the footnotes we lose the sense of commercial pressures and collaborations between women writers, publishers and editors, which are an important element in the history of women’s life writing and female authors’ interactions with the literary marketplace.

The ‘Critical Moment’ In highlighting my encounters with these earlier editors I keep in mind Isobel Grundy’s wise advice not to claim superiority over the past because all editorial practices and theories are of their time.63 I am indebted to Steuart for identifying characters I was otherwise at a loss to track down and, while I do not share his view of the footnotes, I recognize my edition also has its own critical agenda and exists on a continuum with Galt’s and Steuart’s as an incident in the lifetime of the text. In reflecting on my ‘critical moment’, to take McGann’s term, and attempting to historicize my edition, there are a number of differences in approach from my earlier counterparts. My interest in the recovery of Bury’s and Cary’s texts is not primarily for their contribution to a social history of the monarchy and beau monde, or for the pleasurable anecdotes they offer readers, including the memorable image of the Princess of Wales sticking pins in an effigy of her husband or dragging her ladies on an impromptu walk around Bayswater. My edition aims to situate these memoirs within the context of the literary culture surrounding the Queen Caroline Affair, but the case against their

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  135 dismissal as ‘some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’ is made on the basis of their significance within literary history and for what they might tell us about our existing critical narratives of women’s ­writing and life writing. It is therefore part of a confident and self-reflexive turn in feminist literary criticism that seeks to mediate unfamiliar genres of women’s writing so that new works can deconstruct generic assumptions.64 The court memoirs of Bury and Cary contribute to our understanding of early nineteenth-century print culture by allowing insight into commercial relationships between publishers and women writers, particularly authors seeking to capitalize on their personal experiences in autobiographical forms. In Bury’s case, they demonstrate a close relationship between the court memoir and the silver fork fiction she produced during the 1820s and 1840s that disrupts generic distinctions between fiction and life writing. Likewise, Cary’s text suggests the importance of attending to one-off authorship in which questions of pseudonymous publication and fictional narratives may remain unresolved. Both writers’ playfulness with authorial identity seems particularly hospitable to critical readings informed by postmodern doubt regarding the author and recent considerations of the place of ‘Anon.’ in the history of women’s writing.65 The visible connection between the court and society memoirs and women writers of an earlier era suggests intriguing continuities in literary practice during the long eighteenth century which encourages us to think across traditional borders of period and genre. The reception and textual transmission of these works reveal processes of forgetting, fuelled by mid-nineteenth-century anxieties regarding the court memoir as a failed historical discourse, the problematic status of the Regency in the cultural imagination, and the difficulties for women authors attempting to establish themselves as credible witnesses and writers of history. Finally, my fascination with the vociferous reviews, and the prominent place given to them in my edition, may be a consequence of a twenty-first century preoccupation with celebrity, the permeable borders of public and private life and the scandalous revelations of public figures, which resonate with debates in our own time. From this perspective, an editorial project provides not only an opportunity to recover individual female voices, however witty and poignant they may be, but also a chance to re-evaluate our literary histories.

Notes 1 The Times, 11 January 1838, p. 3; Quarterly Review, 61 (1838), pp. 82–90, on p. 84. 2 Edinburgh Review, 67 (1838), pp. 1–80; Athenaeum, 6 January 1838, pp. 4–5, on p. 4. 3 Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, ed. A. Culley and K. Turner, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).

136  Amy Culley 4 C. Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing’, in V. Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 285–305. 5 K. Turner, General Introduction, in Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, vol. 5, pp. xviii, ix. 6 I have written elsewhere on the court memoir as a hybrid form that enabled women to contribute to historical narratives and historiographical debates during the early nineteenth century. A. Culley, ‘Prying into the Recesses of History: Women Writers and the Court Memoir’, in D. Cook and A. Culley (eds), Women’s Life Writing 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 133–49. 7 J. J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). For a summary of the approach of new textualism, see D. Greetham, ‘A History of Textual Scholarship’, in N. Fraistat and J. Flanders (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Textual ­Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 16–41, on p. 37; K. Sutherland, ‘Anglo-American Editorial Theory’, Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 42–60, on p. 57. 8 S. S. Lanser, ‘The “I” of the Beholder: Equivocal Attachments and the Limits of Structuralist Narratology’, in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 206–19, on pp. 208–10. 9 A. Hollinshead Hurley and C. Goodblatt (eds), Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). 10 S. Gossett, ‘Why Should a Woman Edit a Man?’, in Women Editing/Editing Women, pp. 25–34, on p. 29. 11 M. Levy, ‘Women and Print Culture, 1750–1830’, in J. M. Labbe (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830: Volume 5 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 29–46, on p. 39. 12 B. P. Kanner (ed.), Women in Context: Two Hundred Years of British Women Autobiographers (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997), p. 199. 13 There is no record of Cary’s employment in the service of Queen Caroline amongst the Georgian papers or Caroline’s account books that are held in the Royal Archive at Windsor. 14 Cary notes in the Memoirs that she is over twenty-one in 1815 and in 1814 she is not yet twenty-three. 15 E. Henriksen, ‘Editing Anonymous’, in Women Editing/Editing Women, pp. 175–88, on p. 187. 16 C. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, ed. A. Culley, Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 7. 17 C. Cary, Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary, ed. A. Culley, Women’s Court and Society Memoirs, vol. 3, p. 215. 18 Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary, vol. 3, p. 7. 19 Ibid., p. 11. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written by Herself (1825), in J. Peakman (ed.), Whore Biographies, 1700–1825, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006–7), vol. 7 (2007), p. 449. See also, L. M. Thompson, The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) and A. Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 77–141.

‘Some uncalled-for revival of by-gone scandals’?  137 22 Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary, vol. 3, p. 15. 23 ‘Copy letter from Miss C. E. Cary to J. J. D. [?]’, 27 January [1821–4?], Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Howard Bury Papers, C/4, T.3069. 24 Lady A. Hamilton[?], Secret History of the Court of England, from the Accession of George the Third to the Death of George the Fourth, 2 vols (London: W. H. Stevenson, 1832), vol. 1, p. 365. 25 Ibid., p. 375. 26 Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, ed. A. Aspinall, 8 vols (London: Cassell, 1971), vol. 6, p. 360. 27 A. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 177–207; T. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982), pp. 417–66; T. Hunt, ‘Morality and Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair’, Albion, 23 (1991), pp. 697–722. 28 Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’, p. 439. 29 Memoirs of Miss C. E. Cary, vol. 3, pp. 9–10. 30 The phrase is borrowed from N. Fraistat and J. Flanders, ‘Introduction: Textual Scholarship in the Age of Media Consciousness’, in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 1–15, on p. 13. 31 Lady C. Russell, Three Generations of Fascinating Women and other Sketches from Family History (London: Longmans, 1904), p. 196. 32 M. W. Rosa, The Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 155. 33 Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 1, p. 5. 34 Quarterly Review, 61 (1838), p. 83. 35 Henriksen, ‘Editing Anonymous’, p. 176. 36 Quoted in A. Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (London: Constable, 1983), p. 288; Quarterly Review, 61 (1838), pp. 82–3. 37 Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 1, p. 238. 38 Ibid., p. 239. 39 C. Breashears, ‘The Female Appeal Memoir: Genre and Female Literary Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England’, Modern Philology, 107:4 (2010), pp. 607–31. 40 C. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), vol. 3, p. 7. 41 Edinburgh Review, 67 (1838), p. 68. 42 More recent critics have agreed and, writing in unflattering terms in 1965, Edward White suggested that Bury ‘returned to the notes and letters she had collected during her court days, decked them in sentimental and shallow moralizations, and sold them.’ E. M. White, ‘Thackeray, “Dolly Duster”, and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury’, Review of English Studies, 16:61 (1965), pp. 35–43, on p. 36. 43 Athenaeum, 6 January 1838, p. 4. 4 4 Fraser’s Magazine, 18 (1838), pp. 471–81. The use of the footnote for parodic or satiric effect is in line with the literary jokes beloved by writers of the Scriblerus Club of the early eighteenth century. See A. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 110–18. 45 S. S. Lanser, ‘The Author’s Queer Clothes: Anonymity, Sex(uality), and The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu’, in R. J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from

138  Amy Culley

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 7 5 58

59 60 61 62

63 64

65

the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 81–102, on p. 99. S. Benstock, ‘At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text’, PMLA, 98:2 (March 1983), pp. 204–25, on p. 204. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 1, p. 28. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 147. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 2, p. 284. Ibid., p. 167. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 1, pp. 108, 20. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 2, p. 225. M. Warren, ‘The Politics of Textual Scholarship’, in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, pp. 119–34, on p. 126. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, 2nd edn, vol. 3, p. 3. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid. I. Grundy, ‘Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’, in A. M. Hutchison (ed.), Editing Women: Papers given at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3–4 November 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 55–78, on p. 55. K. Sutherland, ‘Anglo-American Editorial Theory’, p. 58. C. Bury, The Diary of a Lady in Waiting, ed. A. F. Steuart, 2 vols (London: John Lane, 1908), vol. 1, p. xiii. Ibid. Ibid. Steuart’s exclusions provide some indication of what he regarded as ‘disgusting’. For instance, he removed a passage claiming that an unidentified aristocrat deceived her husband regarding the death of his daughter by burying a ‘dead kid’. The animal was then ‘disinterred’ and the living child was returned to her father, the shock thereby prompting his suicide. Bury, Diary Illustrative of the Times of George the Fourth, vol. 1, pp. 184–5. Grundy, ‘Editing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’, p. 72. For an example and discussion of the ways in which editors of women’s writing might deconstruct generic assumptions, see J. Gibson and G. Wright, ‘Editing Perdita: Texts, Theories, Readers’, Women Editing/Editing Women, pp. 155–73. For an example, see M. J. M. Ezell, ‘“By a Lady”: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-Century Print Culture’, in The Faces of Anonymity, pp. 63–80.

10 ‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’ Editing women in the Chawton House Library Series Anna M. Fitzer In August 1758 Horace Walpole filled a chest some ‘five feet long, three wide and two deep, brim full’ of papers he had discovered at his cousin Lord Hertford’s seat at Ragley Hall. Private correspondence, state papers, literary documents, bills, bonds – in short, ‘every scrap of paper they ever had’, and which had not been put to culinary or other household use, Walpole attempted to excavate from the lumber room, where, ‘they supported old marbles and screens and boxes.’ A significant proportion of this collection related to Edward, first Viscount Conway, S­ ecretary of State to James I and Charles I, and his namesake and grandson, the first earl, who held the same office during the reign of Charles II: ‘What say you?’, Walpole asked of his friend George Montagu, ‘will not here be food for the press?’1 Walpole’s relish for recovery was, however, tempered by the challenges he faced in editing. In little over six weeks after he had dragged all he could to Strawberry Hill, Walpole found it ‘vast work to dry, range and read’ through his papers. He burned the ‘useless’ and, despite being optimistic of publishing at least a couple of volumes of ‘the most curious’, modified his expectations: ‘because I know how often the public has been disappointed when they came to see in print what in manuscript has appeared to the editor wonderfully choice.’2 Walpole’s assessment of the quantitative and qualitative significance of the materials at his disposal brings the responsibility of the editor – who is, in Walpole’s case, at once alarmingly and reassuringly ­subjective – sharply into focus. The potential usefulness of the bill or bond to a future editor looking to forge different kinds of connections has been irrevocably lost to Walpole’s fire, but, at the same time, Walpole’s own potential reading public was getting neither its fingers burned nor its time consumed, courtesy of his adjudicating expertise. As an editor, he simply needed to intuit the various preferences of individual readers. Ultimately, Walpole’s plans came to nothing, but his experiences as an editor managing difficult questions of selection and inclusion remain relevant.3 In drawing upon my work as editor for the C ­ hawton House Library  ­Series, this essay reflects upon the ways in which a number

140  Anna M. Fitzer of  authorities variously compete and collaborate in a bid to establish the importance of such neglected texts. Walpole, as prospective editor, assumes an authority which is confronted by the inconsistently authoritative nature of the material he is working with and, in turn, the particular excellence of his selection is contingent upon the discernment of his reader. Although Walpole’s ambitions were disappointed, it is interesting that when his example was remembered some seventy-five years later by the poet, novelist and biographer, Alicia LeFanu, the neglected had assumed an authority of their own, and the process of recovery was seemingly without end. In an article written for The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée (1833), Alicia LeFanu ruefully conjured Walpole’s retrieval of the Conway papers in the context of criticism levelled at an increasingly competitive publishing industry. If the rise in the number of authors writing fiction were not rivalship enough, the noble army of ghosts are in full march upon us in the shape of posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin. Happy the house that boasts among its treasures some queerly spelt memoir or diary, drawn up during the leisure hours of a time-honoured ancestor or ancestress! A modern editor would not find it as easy as Horace Walpole did to bag them.4 LeFanu’s particular focus arguably alludes to earlier criticism of autobiography which ‘conservative reviewers attack[ed]’ as ‘an upstart genre reflective of the leveling tendencies of the age.’5 LeFanu’s article had commenced with a lament for the demise of the ‘Craft of Authorship’ and remarked upon the proliferation, in its wake, of variously self-­important and mercenary writers of the tedious tale and ‘specious romance’ drawn from ‘every class of the community’. Included in her survey are American novelists: ‘those brilliant exotics’ who ‘may be compared to the flowers lately imported from their climate, which strike rather by vividness of tint, than delicacy of odour’. As a writer given elsewhere to playful irony, LeFanu’s withering criticism is perhaps – in keeping with her slightly exaggerated finality of tone – only partially intended. LeFanu’s subsequent reference to the bygone age of Walpole, and recognition of the superior merits of his undertaking, brings her mostly sardonic take on present ‘pretensions to literature’ and the diminishing returns of ‘individual talent’, to a close. Her article proceeds in erudite and more serious fashion, to remember another of the unparalleled authorities of the previous century, Jonathan Swift, to whom she could claim a distant family connection.6 However, underlying LeFanu’s reference to Walpole is a sincere and enduring question as to who is worth remembering, what should be saved, and how easy this process could (or should) be. In my own role as a modern editor of the neglected novel and, in particular, of the memoirs

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  141 of lives past, I return to this question, and primarily to LeFanu’s role as a woman writer who might herself be best remembered, not as a critic of recovery, but as its object and agent. LeFanu’s scepticism about contemporary writing practices in general, and the march of the remembered in particular, relates to her own modest success as a novelist, and of that version of editing which is necessary to the writing of a life. LeFanu worked from eye-witness accounts, reminiscence and a finite selection of previously published correspondence to write Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan, published in 1824. On the one hand, her allusion to Walpole and the spoils of Ragley undermines the endless and indiscriminate retrieval of lives less obviously relevant than those of Stuart courtiers, and enables LeFanu to implicitly distinguish her own dealings in posthumous reputation from that of the marauding mass of opportunists now bringing their dubious ancestors to market. On the other, her ironic reference to the ease with which Walpole could fill whole packing cases with what is jokingly considered to be, by modern standards, a modest haul, is redoubled in light of his subsequent difficulties in editing this material. LeFanu’s practice vis-à-vis Sheridan’s life and writings has been contested, in part because she is Sheridan’s granddaughter, and this has contributed to the need for her own work to be newly edited. As editor of five volumes across two strands of Pickering &Chatto’s Chawton House Library Series, I have worked on LeFanu twice, firstly in her capacity as author of the novel, Strathallan, originally published in four volumes in 1816, and secondly, in her role as Sheridan’s biographer. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan was published in 2012 for the first time since the first edition of 1824, and is the first of three titles comprising Memoirs of Women Writers Part I. William Roberts’s Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More, the abridged 1839 edition of the more fully titled Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, first published in 1834, is the second and largest single volume of a set completed by the anonymously penned two-volume Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs Trimmer (1814). Editing women across these volumes presented an opportunity to think in new ways about the interrelation of lives both in a literal sense, and in terms of the more figurative life of the text. In working on the series, all Chawton House Library editors have been re-editing the edit, as it were; re-constituting, albeit through a process of selection, a version of a literary past as it has been variously mediated and handed down to us by the executors of literary estates, publishers and previous editors. This means that the modern editor has an ­opportunity – even an obligation – to restore books to the shelves which fill the gaps occasioned by the decisions and excisions of our predecessors. Whatever our current opinion of those previous decisions, they have, to an extent, contributed to a shaping of literary  legacies,  and  conferred

142  Anna M. Fitzer upon particular writers a certain authority over others. The process of selection, and of evaluating for the present what is important from the past is central to many forms of textual criticism. However, for my own part, the business of editing memoirs and biographies of women writers – of editing a genre seemingly predisposed to form, in writing, a life – has been particularly revealing of the various ways in which the biographical or autobiographical text (the work) is, in addition to the version of the literary life it presents – of Sheridan, of More, of Trimmer – a product of a multiplicity of composite and collaborative authorities, contributors and perspectives. This multiplicity is not confined to the production of the text but also, as evidenced in the case of the Memoirs of Sheridan, and More, the reception of the text once published, or born, as it were. In this respect, the life of the text as written by LeFanu, authored and edited by Roberts, and, in the instance of Trimmer, humbly laid before the public by her son in anonymity, has itself an afterlife which is plural, and also contested. To begin to explain why is to return to the observation that, in respect of all volumes in Memoirs of Women Writers Part I, the biographical subject is herself an author: as such, she is the obvious authority behind other writings by means of which, to us, she is typically best known. It is more likely, for example, that what readers know about Frances Sheridan begins with their having read her novel, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), rather than LeFanu’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan. However, the centrality of that authorial subject to a memoir or account that proudly boasts their pre-eminence was variously challenged in the nineteenth century. The first stages of this effective displacement of their authority might be traced to the prejudices, obligations and agenda of the author of the memoir. In dealing with the journals and original correspondence of the subject, the life-writer is initially practising as her editor. The life of the literary authority, which such early editors negotiated, was further mediated by the publisher, the bookseller and the periodical reviewer. The last is arguably the most invidious participant of all in this process, and can, in the selection and extraction of often-lengthy sections for inclusion in their review, supplant the authority of the editor. If this is an obvious point, for the modern editor working with the series, it is also an important one, for it is in the dialectical relation of different authorial contributors that the shelf life of the text in our hands has so far depended. The texts of LeFanu and Roberts clearly exemplify some of the intrinsic complexities involved in the recovery of lives, and in the editing of such recovery. LeFanu and Roberts undertook a process of editing before publishing, under the auspices of the memoir, works which some readers and critics unproblematically refer to as biography. The definition of memoir, as Faith E. Beasley observes, ‘is as vague as the concept from which it is derived, the French term mémoire or “memory”.’

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  143 Encompassing a narrative account of events in which the author is either participant, or witness or both, memoirs can additionally be construed as in the service of history in their relation of facts: ‘the genre thus occupies an often nebulous critical territory between history and literature’.7 There is, however, a continuity of emphasis ‘across the vast array of texts that can be labelled memoirs’ upon their orientation as first-person accounts which, if not consistently accentuated by personal insights, nevertheless offer a ‘unique perspective’.8 Whereas LeFanu in her Memoirs of Sheridan writes a more recognizably biographical narrative informed by collaborative testimonies, and anecdote, along with occasional direct quotation from Sheridan’s reported speech and letters, Roberts renders More in autobiographical mode by way of extensive extracts from her journal, and a limited selection of correspondence, all of which he organizes into chapters introduced, and variously interleaved with editorial précis, explanation and opinion. The title page announces the text as ‘by’ him, and Roberts, who has provoked more enmity than empathy for undertaking the task of editing More’s vast archive, refers to himself as an editor who has assumed ‘the humble office of biographer’.9 Though scholarly appreciation of life-writing continues to evaluate and, to an extent, define its various forms, Roberts’s example at least suggests an equivocation of terms.10 In 1818, Thomas Moore, whom LeFanu assisted in the preparation of his biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, prevaricated over its title, reasoning, ‘By the bye’, that ‘I have thought of entitling it “Some Account of the Life & Writings &c. &c.” as a less pretending title than “An Essay on the Life & Genius &c”.’11 Moore, then in the early stages of a work he would find troublesome to the point of wishing it out of his hands, eventually settled on Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In light of this, perhaps the titular Memoirs is less an indicator of content or approach, than it is a measure of the author’s sense of their unpretentious relation to the subject of the work; a relation of privilege, or prolonged intimacy, however fraught. Memoirs of Women Writers Part I thus brings together texts which variously interrogate the meaning and significance of memoir, and the role of the author- and editor-as-memorialist.12 LeFanu is the only woman writer in the set authoring the life of another woman, and the nuances of ‘memoirs’ can be considered appropriate to her biography’s uniquely dual perspective. As a title for a work which foregrounds Sheridan’s private experience and distinguished career, ‘memoirs’ resonates with that used to describe a selection of self-penned female accounts published in the eighteenth century, in which a feminine perspective has the potential to present an alternative view of history.13 At the same time, and without prejudice to the professional integrity with which LeFanu approaches her subject, these are her memoirs; the narrative of Sheridan’s life story as passed through the family from mother to daughter

144  Anna M. Fitzer forming an important part of LeFanu’s own personal memory which has contributed, in turn, to her professional development. Despite their endeavours to establish the place of Frances Sheridan and Hannah More in the contested canon, however, both LeFanu and Roberts have been relegated to the footnotes of literary history. And yet, it is often in the footnote that the rewards of editing are found. To reflect firstly upon the literal footnote, is to consider that which exceeds its perfunctory purpose of elucidating allusions and quotation, to instead grant the reader backstage access to the detailed knowledge and influences which inform the text’s central performance. When I edited LeFanu’s novel, her biography and the epistolary expression of More, I was reminded that, preoccupied as we sometimes are with what the woman writer has done, and what we think she is, we are in danger of overlooking the importance of what she sees and hears, what she reads and who she knows.14 Commonalities of experience, and the intersection of literary and social circles – examples of which were revealed across the works dealing with Sheridan, More and Trimmer – are aspects of the histories of women’s writing that can potentially help us to look again at ways in which we can complement the specialist groups, or chronological parameters in which we might have fixed them. New editions encourage these kinds of lateral readings; readings which develop from an interest in recovering literary lives and which work towards a broader enquiry into their literary cultures. The preparation of Chawton House editions in the Novels and Memoirs strands involved extensive editorial annotation. More’s fifty-twoyear publishing career as a dramatist, novelist, poet, philanthropist, antagonist and campaigner for educational reform, in particular, was a seeming vortex of literary influences and real-life acquaintances drawn from every local, parochial and more conspicuously metropolitan circle in which she moved. Pickering & Chatto expected sources of all quotations and allusions to be specified; glosses on persons, obscure places, ‘abstruse words or words in a very unfamiliar sense’ and translations of all foreign text. Some references, the publisher helpfully advised, will be untraceable. Janet Todd, reflecting on her experience of editing Aphra Behn, reassuringly described footnoting as addictive, and it is when ­having once traced the seemingly untraceable that the process, almost imperceptibly, takes hold. Finding the right balance between what Todd calls ‘excess’ and ‘inadequacy’ is difficult when navigating the undercurrents of any text, but the editor’s persistence can at least begin to reveal the depth of the writer’s knowledge.15 In some instances, it is a process which enables a reassessment of a writer who has apparently sunk without trace. The extent of More’s range of reference was not unexpected but, in the case of LeFanu – both in terms of her work as a novelist and as author of the Memoirs – the notes evolved as a dimension in which to acknowledge

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  145 her interactions, connections and learning. Strathallan is a novel arguably much more interested in its peripheral, character community of gullible readers and would-be writers, and in the pretentious posturing of its rival amateur poets, than it is in its central story of true love lost and found. Strathallan is in that sense a book about bookishness and is accordingly replete with quotations and references to a diverse range of sources, at the same time as maintaining a coherence of subject and allusion which defrays any suspicion of LeFanu’s motivation to merely impress. However, one might argue that the inclusion and intersection of other texts has a more subliminal action, even serving to align LeFanu with the practice attributed to leading women writers of the Romantic period for whom intertextual – and, in particular, contemporary – ­reference was perhaps, as Marilyn Butler proposes, indicative of ‘their overt or covert wish to associate themselves with the prestige and networking of a “clerisy” or emerging class of professional intellectuals’.16 In accordance with Pickering & Chatto’s requirements, I converted my footnotes to endnotes, a shift suggestive of my rethinking of the function of the explanatory note (and of the ‘forgotten’ woman writer) as neither subordinate to, nor, at worst, a distraction from, the main body of work. As a discrete section, notes that explain the writer’s text are also poised to challenge what we thought we knew about the limitations of LeFanu’s writing life. Prior to publication of the Chawton House Library edition of Strathallan in 2008, LeFanu had been acknowledged, if not always critically appreciated, as biographer of the more significant Sheridan, a writer whose own rise through the ranks of recognition had been, since the mid-1980s, relatively modest. Where a writer is so far outwith the canon, arguments for her recovery must be based upon the quality of her work, quality that is demonstrable in a modern, accessible edition. This is potentially a mutually frustrating set of circumstances: a text’s relative obscurity counteracting the prospect of publication. One of the aims of Pickering & Chatto’s joint venture with Chawton House was precisely to make available rare texts from the Library’s holdings, and to allow these arguments to be made. In the case of Women’s Novels, authors were typically less well-known writers whose work had not appeared in print since the first edition. Improving accessibility and circulation of overlooked or forgotten literary works and lives, it was an endeavour which has enriched, extended and complicated understandings of women’s literary history in this period. In the broader context of the lives and writings of women who have, at various times, existed as mere footnotes to the grand literary narrative, it remains a useful contribution to understandings as to how that narrative is constructed. The forgetting of Alicia LeFanu, for example, had been hinted at little short of a decade after publication of her sixth novel, Henry the Fourth of France (1826), and within a year of her last (currently) traceable contribution to The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée. In The

146  Anna M. Fitzer Lady Annabetta (1837), a novel by Katherine Thomson, the circulating library catalogue is described as no bad comment upon manners, but it is one of the most humiliating works that an author can take up. To observe how completely the besom of oblivion has swept away from the memory of the present generation those cobwebs which formerly entangled our ancestors within their literary meshes – how a wind has passed over Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. West, Alicia Lefanu, Miss Gunning, and others, so that the sound of them is heard no more; how even Cœlebs and Nubilia are irreverently forgotten, and Sir Charles Grandison remembered by this degenerate age only as Generalissimo of a host of bores.17 LeFanu would appear to have fallen from favour in reputable company, and at the hands of apparently inferior arbiters of taste. But, however grandly expressed, this impression of her disappearance confirms the personal anxieties about individual talent LeFanu betrayed in her journalism, the particularly ephemeral nature of that genre being an irony of which she was also in no doubt. In the late 1830s, LeFanu was on the brink of financial ruin, a circumstance that differently accentuates her sense of affinity with the lamented ‘genuine “live author” of the days of Goldsmith and Churchill’, whose passing her Court Magazine article announces in its opening lines. LeFanu considered them of a species extinct in the modern age, romanticizing the beleagured genius of yore who is ‘distinguished by a rusty black coat, haggard eye, and inaccessible aërie.’18 And yet, if the prevailing fashion is just one of many factors which conspire to an author’s undoing, its significant effects can be some way counteracted by the advocacy of editors. And not least of all because many forgotten authors are only so-called because they have been – in a manner Margaret Anne Doody described as ‘more tantalizing, more infuriating – misremembered.’19 To trace further the origins of LeFanu’s misremembering is to arrive at the slightly earlier date of 1824, at which point the generally positive reception given to her Memoirs as a delightful, amusing and entertaining volume which merited its evident popularity, also fixed her authorial identity as Sheridan’s biographer. LeFanu was rightly deserving of her moment in the sun as a life-writer, but it has arguably cast a long shadow over any notable posthumous reputation she might have derived from her earlier work as a poet and novelist. This is, in part, because LeFanu’s biography was the first – and has, to date, remained the only – full-length study of Frances Sheridan. At the same time, LeFanu’s familial connection to Frances Sheridan has informed doubts as to her credibility as an objective biographer, and has distracted both a contemporary and modern readership from engaging fully with her text. As the granddaughter of Frances, and the niece of Richard Brinsley

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  147 Sheridan, LeFanu’s authority is double-edged. Though the authenticity of an account corroborated by familial testimonies was, upon publication, welcomed by some readers, others have been inclined to consider the reliability of the narrative overly compromised by personal interest. I had already argued, prior to editing LeFanu’s biography of Sheridan, that it might in fact be read as a text that works both with and against prejudicial assumptions precisely about its author’s right to write. 20 When I re-situated it in the context of other memoirs of women writers, however, it became more apparent that, for some contemporary reviewers, the matter of the biographical subject’s being female was potentially as limiting to the prospect of the book’s success as the fact of LeFanu’s relationship to Sheridan. According to a review in the Literary Magnet, for example, which appeared in the year of the Memoirs’ publication, A grand-daughter, in writing of her grandmother, can only exhibit her excellences, or record her merits. If neither of these offered themselves; common piety towards a departed ancestor, would compel her to keep silence. The same principles must cause her to suppress the recollection of every failing. 21 If LeFanu had considered herself dumbfounded by such an interpretation of matrilineal loyalty, she might have been reassured by the Literary Chronicle’s assertion that publication was yet ‘an imperative duty […] owed, if not to her grandmother, then at least to her uncle, in order to vindicate his character from the misstatements and insinuations of his biographers’. 22 Family relationships between author and biographical subject are less problematic if that subject is male. LeFanu had undertaken to do exactly that for Richard Brinsley Sheridan in the latter stages of her Memoirs, and so gains some credit where, in her primary concern for his mother, she loses the interest of those predisposed to see Frances Sheridan’s life as ‘like that of most other women, passed in the same round of domestic duties and with little or nothing of adventure.’23 Most emphatic on this point was the Monthly reviewer, for whom ‘it is only as the mother of Richard Brinsley’ that Frances Sheridan ‘is now known or recollected.’24 Contemporary reviewers, wary of one kind of relation, were excited at the prospect of the female subject’s acquaintance and connection with celebrated literary men. As it was first conceived, a new edition of LeFanu’s Memoirs for a ­t wenty-first century reader could serve future re-evaluations of its focus upon two women writers, whose authority prior readings have challenged to varying extents. The perception that Sheridan’s life lacked ‘adventure’ – from which might be construed events or acts which, being so conspicuously audacious, would surely constitute the kind of ‘failing’ a dutiful female biographer should keep under wraps – is to ignore how

148  Anna M. Fitzer that term, and LeFanu’s text, resonate with risks and uncertainties. Born in the 1720s, Sheridan stepped beyond her own, far from idealized, domestic sphere to engage with Samuel Johnson and David Garrick on both a social and intellectual level, and in the 1760s published and staged her work professionally, ambitious for its critical and commercial success. Incorporated within the Memoirs of Women Writers, the Chawton edition of Sheridan is further poised to exploit overlap and intersection with the lives and experiences of More and Trimmer, writers who, by virtue of their later celebrity and seemingly more obviously comparable religious sensibilities and philanthropic interests, posterity has differently remembered. Additionally, the potential of Memoirs of Women Writers to generate such renewed perspectives on literary relations can also extend to LeFanu. Her figurative encounter with More across the volumes of this set serves as a reminder that women writers separated by significant differences in age and literary prestige, and by those ­period- and genre-specific categories with which we have associated them, could be more literal contemporaries. More was forty-six years LeFanu’s senior, but in the first decade of the nineteenth century, they were both literary debutants. LeFanu’s first work, a poem entitled The Flowers; or, the ­Sylphid Queen went on sale in 1809, just a year after More made her first and only appearance in print as a novelist with Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. The career trajectories of these two women could not have been more different, but that other joint appearance of theirs on the pages of Katherine Thomson’s Lady Annabetta, has also served to highlight the coincidence of their neglect. Where editing can reflect and inform such ongoing shifts in reading tastes, it can also help to differently populate the literary landscape in which those shifts occur. The texts on More and Trimmer had undergone earlier editions, and this textual history lends a further dimension to questions of interrelation and authority. The implications of this can be explored particularly in relation to the Memoirs of More. The Chawton Library edition of Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Hannah More (1839) was first published as a single volume in 1838, and abridged from the original four-volume Memoirs of 1834. The value, worth or usefulness – however we might want to construe it – of this abridged text is not solely down to its editor, however. Rather, the 2012 Chawton edition of Roberts’s text is informed by the socio-historical, commercial and ideological circumstances in which it was produced, and the modishness of its subject matter. It is informed by the text’s critical reception – both positive and negative – as well as by the perception of More as a dry authoritarian, which endured into the twentieth century. More herself had treated much earlier indications of this with good humour, relating in a letter to William Wilberforce the ‘true story’ of her having been recreated in effigy at a children’s ball in London and equipped ‘with a large rod in my hand prepared to punish such naughty doings.’25 I would argue that the Chawton edition of a

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  149 later, significantly revised and reduced version of a text which, in the first edition still has its detractors, vitally enables us to understand the work in this context of collaboration and contest. As academic editors in the series, we are participants in this very process of multiplicity and debate, but we also expose its mechanisms. Editor of the British Review from 1811 to 1822, Roberts was a practising barrister and, in the years immediately prior to publication of Memoirs, secretary of the ecclesiastical revenues commission. He first made acquaintance with More in 1814, his sisters, Mary and Margaret Roberts being two of her closest friends. As Nicholas D. Smith points out, they had been entrusted with papers by Patty, More’s own younger sister, several years before More formally granted the Roberts sisters full jurisdiction in her will of 1830. 26 In her lifetime, More had asked her correspondents to return originals or copies of her letters, having previously issued instructions that others should be burned, but she ultimately relinquished control over the appointment of her biographer. She was not without sympathy for the custodians of her literary afterlife, and apologized to the Roberts sisters for sending on to them the many unsolicited applications for help her fame and wealth routinely invited. More was aware that her executors had approached their brother as a potential candidate, but she was as ignorant of his having seen any documents as she was despairing of there being anyone really prepared to ‘go thro the drudgery with rapidity.’27 However, Roberts accepted the task following the death of his sister Mary on 30 September 1832. More died on 7 September 1833, and the first edition of Roberts’s Memoirs was published on 25 August 1834. A second edition followed that year, with a third in 1835. The Memoirs originally sold at the impressive rate of 2000 copies in the three weeks following publication, a print run repeated for two further editions (or impressions as Roberts sometimes calls them). More’s goddaughter, Marianne Thornton, dismissed it as ‘trash’, in part on the basis of misleading alterations she claims Roberts made to More’s bad grammar. 28 To give an example cited in my introduction, Thornton objects to the correction of More’s expressing to her, ‘When I think of you I am gladerer, and gladerer, and gladerer’, to ‘I am very glad.’29 But Thornton also had misgivings about the distortion of her godmother’s ‘playful’ character on account of changes made to More’s unflattering descriptions of certain individuals whose ‘feelings and delicacy’ Roberts had, from his perspective, ‘anxiously studied to avoid offending.’30 Roberts made this observation in his preface to the first edition, and in the second, addressed criticism which, to the contrary, accused him of retaining too many traces of More’s ‘unspiritual intercourse’ with midto-late-century London society. 31 Though he justified bringing ‘before the world this distinguished woman as she really was when she mixed with it’ as a means to proving the excellence of her Christian example

150  Anna M. Fitzer in overcoming its temptations, he maintained that scrupulous selection and suppression was not part of his method. 32 Any attempt ‘to garble the letters’ to the satisfaction of ‘all tastes and opinions’ would not only have been impossible, he argued, but also incompatible with what, by his third edition preface, he describes as his aim to produce ‘a record of truth, – such as might deserve the name of biography; – an honest history of a life’.33 The second edition had seen Roberts make minor corrections to typographical errors and to the sequence of a correspondence he had admittedly found difficult and overly time-consuming to date with assured accuracy. By the third, he expressed greater satisfaction with his improvements in this vein, though he was by then defensively shadow-boxing his way through its thirty-two-page preface with a far more ‘unsparing enemy’ than Marianne Thornton. 34 In November 1834, John Gibson Lockhart, then editor of the Quarterly and later biographer of Walter Scott, published an excoriating review which has since served to significantly influence the Memoirs’ posthumous reputation. In this, Lockhart took up the ‘acid pen’ with which, in 1827, he had ‘christened his Quarterly career’ and derided a selection of memoirs and autobiographical works published between 1824 and 1826.35 His criticism of Roberts’s Memoirs emerged against a  background of other verdicts on memoirs, which similarly gave expression to the underlying assumption that there was a rank of biographer more equal to the task than others. John Watkins, for example, whose biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan LeFanu herself had assiduously corrected, had been referred to in the Monthly’s review of her title and maligned as one of ‘the hasty, crude, undigested trash of biographers, who undertake the life of a celebrated man as soon as his breath has left his body, from the same mercenary motive with which the tradesman undertakes his funeral.’36 At the outset, Lockhart’s criticism was less concerned with Roberts’s alacrity than it was with his presumption. Roberts had taken the life of an authoress – one of that ‘generally speaking, long-lived race’ whose rate of endurance the Quarterly had, in a recent issue, found so remarkable as to tabulate – and subjected it to ‘the peculiar views and prejudices of the religious sect’. The ageing More could be forgiven for lending the evangelical cause ‘the distinction of her too exclusive favour’, conceded Lockhart, but her biographer could not. As I observed in introducing Roberts’s text, Lockhart considered him at his most provocative when pronouncing upon the lives of others, with Roberts’s claim that a Moravian minister positively influenced a dying Samuel Johnson’s state of mind, causing Lockhart to concur in the worthlessness of his particular ‘class’. Lockhart accused Roberts of often writing with ‘the confusion and verbosity of one whose brain has been less exercised than his hand’. As to that, Roberts’s labour in organizing and arranging More’s papers was dismissed as ‘clumsy’.37 Roberts defended himself and More from what he described as ‘a critical assault which, though its motives were not less apparent than its

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  151 ignorance, had yet on its side an imposing advantage in the language of assumed authority and magisterial self-complacency.’38 He claimed not to know the identity of his assailant, but inhabited the cadence of Lockhart’s prose in this assured rebuff. Both sides had a point. Roberts was, in printing More’s documents, presenting the public with something which at that time was ‘wholly new’.39 But even those biographers who have since used Roberts’s versions of More’s correspondence, have also tended to agree with Lockhart’s derisory opinion of his method. Roberts admitted of his difficulty in reducing the great mass of letters with which he was confronted, but for More’s most recent biographer, Anne Stott, his misdating, cutting and splicing of her correspondence, and censoring of her expression, are considered ‘acts of vandalism’.40 The authoritative view on Roberts’s mismanagement of the correspondence must remain with those who have, like Stott, since consulted More’s autograph manuscripts. Nicholas D. Smith’s survey of More’s extant literary and epistolary papers gives direction to scholars poised to make their own selections from More’s archive, and from versions of writing which differ from those printed by Roberts. It reconstructs a primary source invaluable to the ‘inevitable’ production of future critical editions, while conceding that further papers may yet come to light.41 More understood this inevitability all too well, and intercepted the process, seemingly without too much care for the implications of her own acts of vandalism. When, for instance, she allowed letters sent to her from Horace Walpole to be printed in Mary Berry’s edition of his posthumous Works, she did so only after seeing that they were ‘disencumbered’ of content she considered unflattering, improper or, in a very specific instance, overly emphatic as to the talents of Ann Yearsley.42 It is for this reason that Roberts’s problematic text, especially in its most revised and reduced form, should not be supplanted by those to which it gives rise, but be recognized as intrinsic to understandings of the history of editorial practices, and of making and shaping literary legacies. Editing the abridged version, I was dealing with a text that had been through four incarnations before it was poised to be differently positioned in the Memoirs set. Roberts’s second and third editions had been followed by a two-volume format published in London in 1835, and in New York in 1836. In these he made revisions and cuts, claiming to have moved towards something ‘more strictly biographical’.43 The vital parts of More’s life were then transplanted to a single volume incorporated in Edward Bickersteth’s series, the Christian’s Family Library. My role as editor did not require me to include the detailed accounting for what had been lost to previous edits, but in summary, running to a still sizeable 472 pages, the 1839 single foolscap octavo volume omits the majority of letters sent to More, while still representing, in letters from her rendered in part or as fragments, over a quarter of her original recipients. These include Elizabeth Carter and Frances Boscawen, who were acquaintances made

152  Anna M. Fitzer during her early ‘light and unspiritual’ years in the wilderness of 1770s London society.44 Texts in the Chawton House Library Series: Women’s Novels were reset, but all in the Memoirs of Women Writers sets were reproduced in facsimile, and Roberts’s Memoirs retained the typographical features of the abridged text and original pagination. A portrait of More, the frontispiece in the first edition, is displayed on the facing page to Bickersteth’s ‘Prefatory Remarks’, by way of which he, as Series Editor, ‘willingly introduces’ the volume to his Library ‘in the belief that this account of so exemplary a Christian lady is peculiarly calculated to be useful to females’.45 Robustly and expensively bound as befits its principal use as a scholarly alternative to the fragile and less widely accessible original, the Chawton edition enables its readership to experience the text (if not its exact materiality) as it would have appeared to two young scholars, Anne Sturt and Georgiana J­ ackson. A calf-bound copy awarded to Anne in 1839 ‘for Superiority in the first Class of the half yearly examination’, and in cloth boards to ­G eorgiana for ­‘ Improvement in Composition’ in 1849, indicate that Bickersteth’s compact alternative to the four-tome first edition, aimed at constraining the excesses of a new generation of women, was clearly reaching its intended reader.46 For the new, sophisticated reader, the version as encountered by Anne and Georgiana in the mid-nineteenth century has, what Douglas S. Mack describes in a related context, ‘its own kind of coherence and interest.’47 At the same time, the sociological significance of the Chawton facsimile does not limit the role of editor to that of curator of a museum piece newly displayed. It doubly signifies as the means through which the modern editor, in the manner of a biographer, draws attention to the text’s fuller life. The editorial exposition of the basis upon which the memoirs was developed, acknowledgement of its genesis, production and reception history conspire to complicate its appearance as a copy made in the image of a previous version. It is, rather, a text in flux, inscribing a history of the causes of its own disappearance, or neglect. In the 2012 edition, Roberts’s morphous Memoirs is physically larger than the single volume as originally published, a decision which I allow myself to think of as rendering it, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice might (and in the kind of English Roberts saw fit to suppress), ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ Flights of fancy aside, when first encountering the abridged Memoirs of More as a reader, rather than in my role as editor, I thought it retained something of the polyphony characteristic for me of Roberts’s first four-volume edition. Untrammelled by personal connection or lofty prejudice, and heathenishly undaunted by the accumulating fervour of Bickersteth’s preface, I found More to be at once amusing and seriously moral; intimately and instructively connected with a world she wryly observed; patient, unforgiving, opinionated and sometimes relentless,

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  153 but often winningly self-effacing. The potential meaning of a text might not be quite sans fin, but my own preparation of ‘food for the press’, to borrow Walpole’s term, did serve to draw attention to the ongoing complexities of authority in all its aspects. Scrutiny of the authority of the life-writer, of their subject and text applies to their reviewers, critical readers, as well as to their editors, who are engaged in authorizing the new significance of writers and their lives to literary history.

Notes 1 To George Montagu, 20 August 1758, in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford: including numerous letters now first published from the original manuscripts, 6 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), vol. 3, pp. 382–3. An edition of Walpole’s letters to Montagu had first appeared in 1818. 2 To the Rev. Henry Zouch, 5 October 1758, in Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. 3, p. 401. 3 For discussion of the fate of the Conway Papers see D. Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4 A. LeFanu, ‘Swift, Sheridan, and Delany’, The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée, 1 May 1833, pp. 220–3, on p. 220. 5 E. Stelzig, ‘Introduction. Romantic Autobiography in England: Exploring its Range and Variety’, in E. Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 1–12, on p. 4. 6 LeFanu, ‘Swift, Sheridan, and Delany’, p. 220. 7 F. E. Beasley, ‘Memoir’, in M. Spongberg, A. Curthoys and B. Caine (eds), Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 330–9, on p. 331. 8 Ibid. 9 W. Roberts, Preface to the Third Edition, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1835), vol. 1, p.xviii. This also includes first and second edition prefaces. 10 See, for example, M. Benton, Literary Biography: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 11 To Thomas Wilkie, 25 August 1818, in The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. W. S. Dowden, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. 1, p. 462. 12 Memoirs of Women Writers Parts II and III (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013–14), 6 vols, edited by G. Luria Walker, focuses upon Mary Hays’s ­portraits of notable women, the title of which – Female Biography; or, memoirs of illustrious and celebrated women, of all ages and countries – further reflects the interchangeability of terms. 13 See Beasley, Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, esp. pp. 332–3. 14 The same point is made by the Monthly reviewer of Roberts’s Memoirs, though to a different end: what, and particularly who More sees and hears is more interesting than preconceived and essentially unshakeable assumptions as to what she has done and is. Monthly Review, 3:2 (October 1834), pp. 155–69. 15 J. Todd, ‘“Pursue that way of fooling, and be damn’d”: Editing Aphra Behn’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, 27:3 (1995), pp. 304–19, on p. 312.

154  Anna M. Fitzer 16 M. Butler, ‘Editing Women’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, 27:3 (1995), pp. 273–83, on p. 281. 17 [K. Thomson], The Lady Annabetta. A Novel, 3 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), vol. 2, pp. 10–11. 18 LeFanu, ‘Swift, Sheridan, and Delany’, p. 220. 19 M.A. Doody, ‘Response’ in, Editing Women: Papers given at the ­Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3–4 ­November 1995, ed. A. M. Hutchison (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 125–40, on p. 125. 20 See A. M. Fitzer, ‘Relating a Life: Alicia LeFanu’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan’, Women’s Writing, 15:1 (2008), pp. 32–54. 21 The Literary Magnet of the Belles Lettres, Science, and the Fine Arts, 1:1 (January 1824), pp. 189–92, on p. 190. 22 The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, Saturday 20 March 1824, pp. 177–9, on p. 177. 23 The London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, & c., Saturday 27 March 1824, pp. 195–6, on p. 195. 24 The Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, CIV, 2nd Series (1824), pp. 257–65, on p. 259. 25 Roberts dates this letter 1792 in Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 2, p. 317. 26 N. D. Smith, The Literary Manuscripts and Letters of Hannah More (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), p. 3. 27 More to Charles Hoare, 23 December [1822] quoted in Smith, The Literary Manuscripts, p. 3. 28 Quoted in Smith, The Literary Manuscripts, p. 4. 29 A. M. Fitzer, General Introduction, in Memoirs of Women Writers Part I, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), vol. 1, p. xvi. 30 Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 1, p. vi. 31 Ibid., p. viii. 32 Ibid., p. viii. 33 Ibid., pp. x, xiii. 34 Ibid., p. xvi. 35 F. R. Hart, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), p. 4. In this earlier attack on autobiography ‘Lockhart is picking on very easy targets by deigning to notice works that would normally be unlikely to receive notice in the periodical press. […]The real object of his critique, needless to say, is the “kind” itself, the genre.’ J. Treadwell, Autobiographical Writing and British Literature, 1783–1834 (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 77. 36 The Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, CIV, 2nd Series (1824), pp. 257–65, on p. 259. 37 [J. G. Lockhart], The Quarterly Review, 52:104 (November 1834), pp. 416–441, on pp. 416–7. 38 W. Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1836), vol. 1, p. v. 39 Lockhart, Quarterly Review, p. 425. 40 A. Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. viii. 41 Smith, The Literary Manuscripts, p. xxvi.

‘Posthumous remains, family papers, and reminiscences sans fin’  155 42 Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 3, p. 15, and C. H. Bennet, ‘The Text of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Hannah More’, Review of English Studies, 3:12 (1952), pp. 341–5, on p. 343. 43 Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols (1836), vol. 1, p. vi. 4 4 Roberts, Preface [to the second edition], Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, vol. 1, p. viii. 45 E. Bickersteth, Prefatory Remarks, William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Hannah More, ed. A. M. Fitzer, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), vol. 2, p. 7. 46 Quoted from copies in the author’s possession. 47 D. S. Mack, ‘Editing Different Versions of Romantic Texts’, Yearbook of English Studies, The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles, 29 (1999), pp. 176–90, on p. 187.

11 Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters in twenty-five volumes Peter Sabor

Frances Burney, Mme d’Arblay (1752–1840) is perhaps best known today for her four novels: Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814), all of which are available in modern scholarly editions.1 She was also the author of four comedies and four tragedies. Unpublished and, with one exception, unperformed in her lifetime, these plays are now available in a two-volume collected edition and are receiving increasing critical attention, as well as stage productions. 2 Burney’s novels, other than the epistolary Evelina, are exceptionally long: Cecilia, Camilla and The Wanderer were all first published in five volumes and each runs to over 900 closely printed pages in its modern edition. Burney was, however, still more prolific as a journal- and letter-writer. Over 10,000 manuscript pages of her journals and letters are extant, beginning in March 1768, three months before her sixteenth birthday, and concluding only in August 1839, a few months before her death in January 1840 at the age of eighty-seven. Shortly after her death, a ­seven-volume selection from this vast and fascinating body of material was published as Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay (1842–6), edited by her niece, Charlotte Barrett.3 This heavily abridged edition, omitting about half of the extant material, was revised by Austin Dobson and reissued, with a new introduction, in six volumes (1904–5), although its text remained unaltered. It was supplemented by a lightly annotated two-volume edition, The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778 (1889), edited by Annie Raine Ellis: an abridgement of the ten-year p ­ eriod (1768–78) that Barrett chose to omit, so that her edition could begin on a triumphant note with the publication of Evelina.4 For over fifty years now, a group of scholars has striven to remedy the deficiencies of the Barrett-Dobson and Ellis volumes by producing a standard modern edition of Burney’s journals and letters. Before discussing my own part in this enterprise, I wish to consider the history of a very large editorial project from its beginnings to the present day. The modern editing of Burney’s journals and letters goes back to 1972, when the first two volumes of a twelve-volume edition entitled The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), 1791–1839, were published by Oxford University Press under the general editorship of

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  157 Joyce Hemlow.5 Hemlow was, by then, clearly established as the world’s leading Burney scholar. In 1948, she had completed her Harvard University doctoral dissertation, ‘Fanny Burney and the Courtesy Books’, under the direction of George Sherburn, before joining the Department of English at McGill University, Montreal, and rising through the ranks from Assistant Professor to Greenshields Professor of English Literature.6 While publishing several articles on Burney, she also set to work on a major scholarly biography, published in 1958 as The History of Fanny Burney.7 Although her critical analyses of Burney’s novels, plays and journal-writing are now thoroughly dated, Hemlow’s meticulous recording of the life has not yet been surpassed. Having published her biography, Hemlow could turn her attention to editing Burney’s journals and letters. To do so, she initiated what she termed the Burney Project at McGill University and had copies made of every journal and letter to and from Burney that she could find. The three major locations of Burney manuscripts, in order of importance, are the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Barrett Collection at the British Library and the Osborn Collection at the ­B einecke Library, Yale University. In addition, over 150 archives, public and private, contain Burney letters. Many of these items came to light in 1964–5, when Hemlow sent letters of enquiry to some 1,000 archives in the United Kingdom and 1,500 in the United States.8 The fruits of this research appeared in another major, though under-used, publication: A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence, 1749–1878. This bulky reference work, as Hemlow notes, ‘locates and arranges in chronological groupings a family correspondence of some ten thousand extant letters written by over a thousand persons between the middle of the eighteenth century and the last quarter of the nineteenth’:9 from a letter of July 1749 by Christopher Smart to Dr Charles Burney to one of April 1878 by Charlotte Barrett’s son Richard Barrett. Hemlow’s next task was to transcribe and annotate the texts of Burney’s journals and letters. Her aim was to restore the material to its original state, presenting modern readers with the letters as seen by their recipients, rather than as later revised by their anxious author. As Lars E. Troide observes, Burney had ‘over twenty years of widowhood to pore over her own journals and letters, burning, crossing out and re-writing whatever she did not wish posterity to see, either at all or in its original state’.10 Burned letters, of course, are gone forever, but obliterated words, lines and entire pages can eventually, with much painstaking work, be recovered. So too can sheets with paste-overs, most of them put in place by Charlotte Barrett, consisting either of blank pages or of fragments taken from other Burney journals and letters. In Hemlow’s edition, the numerous obliterations were, as far as possible, read through and the extraneous paste-overs removed, so that the underlying texts could be seen.11

158  Peter Sabor After decades of such preparatory work, Hemlow could at last proceed with publication of the magisterial collected edition for which she acted as general editor, as well as editor or co-editor of eight of the twelve volumes. Its title, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, seems odd today; Frances Burney is now seldom referred to by her nickname, used only by family members and close friends. It should perhaps have been called The Journals and Letters of Frances d’Arblay, since Mme d’Arblay was the name by which Burney wished to be known following her marriage to the French émigré Alexandre d’Arblay in July 1793.12 Also problematic is the date at which the edition opens: 1791, when Burney left court after five years of unhappy service as Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte, rather than 1768, when the great mass of material begins. In the general introduction to her edition, Hemlow notes that the journals and letters of Burney’s later years, 1791–1840, were those ‘most drastically curtailed or rejected’ in Barrett’s edition. She also adds wryly that ‘one can only plead the brevity of life. He who would edit must begin young’.13 By beginning in medias res, however, Hemlow was leaving much editorial work for others to undertake. Hemlow envisaged the completion of her edition in ten volumes,14 which eventually swelled into twelve. The first four, published in 1972 (volumes 1–2) and 1973 (volumes 3–4), cover the years of Burney’s courtship and marriage to d’Arblay, the birth of their only son Alexander in 1794, the publication of Camilla in 1796, the d’Arblays’ family life in Camilla Cottage, Surrey, the death of Burney’s beloved sister Susanna in 1800 and the events leading up to the d’Arblays’ departure for France in 1802. Volumes five and six, published in 1975, cover Burney’s ten-year stay in France, including the gruesomely detailed account of her mastectomy for breast cancer in 1811 and concluding with her surreptitious return to England in August 1812, accompanied by her son Alexander but not by her husband, who was compelled to remain in France until 1814. For the next four volumes, Hemlow’s role was primarily that of general editor. Volume seven, co-edited by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, appeared in 1978. It covers Burney’s two-year stay in England, including the publication of The Wanderer in March 1814, the death of her father a month later and the family discord created by the terms of his will, Alexander’s enrolment as an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and his parents’ return to France following the initial abdication of Napoleon, in November 1814. Volume eight, edited by Peter Hughes, followed in 1980. It covers a single year, the most arduous of Burney’s long life, in which she fled from France to Belgium in March 1815 while her husband returned to military service, fighting in the allied army opposing Napoleon. It concludes in October 1815 following Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo and the d’Arblays’ return to England, where Burney would remain for the rest of her life. Volumes nine and ten, edited by Warren Derry, appeared in 1982. They span the

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  159 years that the d’Arblays spent in Bath, 1815–18, with Alexandre in increasingly ill health until his death in May 1818. This period also saw the death of Charles Burney, Jr in December 1817 and Alexander’s election as Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in March 1818, after achieving unexpected success in his final examinations as an undergraduate. The series concluded in 1984 with volumes eleven and twelve, both edited by Hemlow herself. With Burney’s rate of production slowing down at last, they cover a far longer period than any of their predecessors: twenty-one years, from 1818 to 1839. These years of her widowhood are marked by a series of deaths, including, in 1821, that of her sailor brother James, appointed to Rear Admiral in the last year of his life; in 1832 of her sister Esther and her closest friend Frederica Lock; and, worst of all, in 1837 of her son Alexander, who died within two months of taking up the position of Perpetual Curate to the Chapel of Ely in High Holborn. These volumes also record the publication of Burney’s final, and least esteemed, publication, Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832), and her endless attempts to shape the manuscripts of her journals and letters into an entity that could be published after her death. In 1986, Hemlow retired from McGill University, spending the last fifteen years of her life in Nova Scotia, until her death, aged ninety-five, in 2001.15 It would take two more general editors, Lars E. Troide and myself, to complete the editorial project that Hemlow had begun. Our editing was facilitated by a prior undertaking directed by Althea Douglas, a key member of Hemlow’s editorial team. Several hundred leaves of Burney’s pre-1791 journals held at the Berg Collection contained paste-overs, as had a similar number of leaves for the later period. In 1979, the earlier set of paste-overs was successfully removed in a complex ‘float-off’ operation.16 The extensive manuscript material revealed by this procedure could now be transcribed and published for the first time. Many of the paste-overs are blank, but some are cut away from other parts of journals and letters. These fragments were, where possible, restored to their original locations. Troide, Hemlow’s successor as Director of the Burney Project at McGill, entitled his edition The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney.17 The first volume, covering the years 1768 to 1773, appeared in 1988, within four years of the final instalment of Hemlow’s edition. Also published by Oxford University Press, it was announced as ‘the first of ten or twelve that will cover Fanny Burney’s journals and letters from 1768 to the middle of 1791’,18 thus forming a seamless link with Hemlow’s volumes. The tone of Burney’s early journals and letters is far more exuberant than that of her later writings. She finds herself, with the publication of Evelina, becoming a celebrity, and marvels at her newfound fame. She becomes a frequent guest at Streatham Park, the home of Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament, and his wife, the author Hester Lynch Thrale, with whom she forms a close

160  Peter Sabor friendship. She is also befriended by Samuel Johnson, whom she saw regularly at Streatham. She writes her first comedy, The Witlings, encouraged by Johnson, Hester Thrale and the dramatists Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Arthur Murphy. Regrettably it is suppressed by her father and Samuel Crisp, who were afraid that Burney’s play would offend bluestockings such as Elizabeth Montagu. More happily, Burney’s second novel, Cecilia, is published in 1782 to wide acclaim. Had Troide’s series, edited to the same high standards as Hemlow’s, proceeded as swiftly as hers, the entire run would have been completed by the year 2000 – but this was not to be. Instead, the new volumes appeared at increasingly lengthy intervals: volume two (1774–7) in 1990; volume three (1778–9), co-edited by Troide and Stewart Cooke, in 1994; volume four (1780–81), edited by Betty Rizzo, in 2003; and volume five (1782–3), also co-edited by Troide and Cooke, in 2012. For volumes three to five, the primary publisher was McGill-Queen’s University Press; the shift from Oxford did nothing to accelerate the rate of progress. Troide (who died in 2013) retired from McGill University in 2002 and ceased his editorial work on Burney before the publication of volume five. The Early Journals thus concluded with that volume, leaving the period 1784 to 1791 still to be published. Following Troide’s retirement I was appointed to McGill with a Canada Research Chair in 2003, as Director of the Burney Project. A substantial grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation enabled the Project to move into a large, well-equipped space, named the Burney Centre, in the McLennan Library. Stewart Cooke, Associate Director of the Centre, and I conceived a way to complete the work that Hemlow and Troide had begun. We decided to begin with a six-volume edition, The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney,19 covering her five years at Court, 1786–91. Oxford University Press undertook to publish the series, for which I edited the first volume, for 1786, while Cooke edited the second, for 1787; these volumes appeared together in 2011. Volume one reveals, inter alia, the full extent of Burney’s bewilderment and distress at the attempted assassination of George III by a deranged housemaid, Margaret Nicholson, recorded in both her formal journals and her private letters. It also contains Burney’s memorable account of her visit with the royal family to the Harcourts’ seat at Nuneham Courtenay and then to Oxford, where the King was making his first public appearance after his narrow escape from his would-be assassin. Volume two finds Burney continuing to suffer at the hands of her co-Keeper of the Robes, the dictatorial Elizabeth Schwellenberg, and warding off the advances of the Reverend Charles de Guiffardière, the Queen’s reader in French, who treats her with an odd combination of mockery and apparent admiration. For the single year 1788, edited by Lorna J. Clark, two volumes were required: Burney’s journal-writing then was more copious than at any

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  161 other time of her life. The year was marked by two major events, both of which affected Burney deeply: the opening of the ­protracted trial of Warren Hastings, first governor of India, which would be concluded only in 1795, and the onset of the ‘madness’ of George III. In her ­personal life, Burney was increasingly distraught by what she took to be the courtship of Stephen Digby, Vice-Chamberlain to the Queen, who in 1789 would, instead, marry Charlotte Gunning, a wealthy Maid of Honour. Clark’s volume appeared in 2014, followed, two years later, by Geoffrey Sill’s for 1789, when George III was restored to health and the Regency Crisis averted. The series will be completed in 2018 with Nancy Johnson’s volume for 1790–1, c­ ulminating in Burney’s departure from Court in July 1791 after Queen Charlotte reluctantly accepted her resignation. A final set of volumes under my general editorship, Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, also published by Oxford University Press, is now in progress. It will make available for the first time a wealth of material included neither in the Barrett-Dobson edition nor in the modern series of Burney’s journals and letters. The first volume, edited by Cooke, was published in 2015. 20 It covers the years 1784–6, a pivotal time for Burney. She began them at the height of her fame as a novelist and ended them by leaving the spotlight to enter a life of servitude at the highest level. In 1784, she suffered two serious losses: her friend and mentor Samuel Johnson died and Hester Lynch Thrale married Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian musician. Here we find Burney’s account of Johnson’s last days and her grief at his death. We also read of her strong disapproval of Thrale’s marriage and her attempt to mediate between Thrale and her outraged daughters, an intervention that put a permanent end to an extraordinary friendship. In similar detail, often in heavily overscored but now recovered passages, Burney writes of her gradual realization that the man she loved, George Owen Cambridge, was never going to propose marriage to her. At this time too Burney made the acquaintance of Mary Delany, who introduced her to the King and Queen, thereby paving her way to a position that Burney was most reluctant to accept. Cooke’s volume also contains, as appendices, three newly discovered letters that should have appeared in previous volumes of Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. The second volume of Additional Journals and Letters (hereafter AJL2), forthcoming in 2018, which I have edited, spans the years 1791– 1840: the same period covered by Hemlow’s twelve volumes. In the more than thirty years that have elapsed since the completion of Hemlow’s edition, many new letters have come to light; I have amassed some 140 for this final volume of the several series. A few were printed by Hemlow but without a commentary, because they were last-minute finds; in these cases I have used Hemlow’s text but added annotations. Some others, conversely, appear in Hemlow with commentary but with incomplete or abridged texts, since she lacked access to the relevant manuscripts;

162  Peter Sabor in these cases, I have drawn on Hemlow’s commentary while providing fresh transcriptions of the complete texts. In addition to these special cases, over 120 letters and one journal letter appear here for the first time. In the remainder of this essay I shall consider a few of these items and the editorial problems that they present. The journal letter, written to Burney’s sister Susan and their close friend Frederica Lock around 16 December 1791, is at the Berg Collection. Hemlow knew of its existence, but mistakenly dated it as 15 December [1785], 21 thus excluding it from her edition. It is, however, the conclusion of a journal letter printed in her first volume. At the end of that letter, Burney describes the events of 15 December 1791. The author Richard Owen Cambridge and his daughter Charlotte Cambridge had called for Burney at her father’s home in Chelsea, and the three were en route to Twickenham Meadows, the Cambridges’ home in Twickenham. When Burney hears that Cambridge’s son, her former suitor, the clergyman George Owen Cambridge, will be there, she declares: ‘To be amicable, to end the long difficulties by perfect peace, & give them every comfort that they could accept or receive through my means, was my sole & uniform design’. 22 Once Burney arrives at Twickenham, as readers of AJL2 will see, her resolution is put to the test. She finds the Cambridge family as hard to read as ever, attempting in vain to discover if George Owen has settled on a woman to be his wife and receiving no useful guidance from either his father or his sister. Also of interest in this journal letter are the Cambridges’ remarks about two paintings by Thomas Stewart, commissioned by Richard Owen. One of these appears in the form of a stipple engraving by Charles Bestland, entitled ‘Dr. Johnson’s Ghost’, in The Works of Richard Owen Cambridge, posthumously published in 1803; the journal letter throws new light on the origins of this intriguing illustration. Also known to Hemlow, but largely absent from her edition, was the voluminous correspondence between Burney and Hester Maria Thrale, dubbed ‘Queeney’ by Dr Johnson, the eldest daughter of her former friend Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi. The friendship between Burney and Queeney, later Viscountess Keith, endured for over sixty years: from March 1777, when they first met, until Burney’s death in 1840. During that period they exchanged numerous letters, of which 85 are extant: many of them lengthy and revealing. Yet when Hemlow published her biography of Burney, she was not granted access to the mass of Thrale papers then at Bowood House, which included all of Hester Maria’s letters from Burney. Nor was Hemlow allowed to publish the Burney-Thrale letters in The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. A brief selection of the letters from Burney to Hester Maria Thrale had been published in The Queeney Letters (1934)23 by the sixth Marquis of Lansdowne, Henry William Edmund Petty-Fitzmaurice, a descendant of Hester Maria’s stepdaughter Margaret Mercer de Flahaut. The

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  163 eighth Marquis of Lansdowne, George John Charles Mercer Nairne ­ etty-Fitzmaurice, who held the title from 1944 until his death in 1999, P apparently believed that his ancestor’s selection was all that the public should be allowed to see of what he regarded as his family’s private correspondence. Hemlow was able to draw on some letter-book copies made by Alexandre d’Arblay, but these are unreliable abridgements and conflations of the originals. Happily, however, the Bowood archive was eventually bought by Mary Hyde, Viscountess Eccles, who on her death in 2003 bequeathed it to Harvard University; it is now readily available to scholars at the Houghton Library and in the form of scans on the Harvard Library website. AJL2 includes thirty letters from Burney to Thrale that should have appeared in Hemlow’s volumes, including full texts of those that she printed from the letter-book copies. They are of substantial interest, with many fresh analyses of Thrale and her fraught relationship with Burney. On two occasions, fifteen years apart, Burney sent Queeney highly partial accounts of the events leading up to the rupture of her friendship with Hester Thrale immediately after the latter’s marriage to Piozzi in July 1784, and the two women’s subsequent ­estrangement – a subject on which Burney also wrote at length, in French, over an eightmonth period from May 1804 to January 1805. 24 There are also repeated discussions of the war with France and the leading role taken by Queeney’s husband, Admiral Keith, in the eventual surrender of Napoleon. There are accounts too by Burney of her novel in progress, The Wanderer, the manuscript of which she had brought with her from France, with considerable difficulty, on her return to England. Sixty-four of the letters in AJL2, nearly half of the total, date from Burney’s ten-year stay in France, 1802–12, and are written, in French, to a variety of French correspondents. 25 The sources for those written between 1802 and 1806 are notebooks, preserved in the Berg Collection, in which Burney wrote drafts of the letters. These drafts were then meticulously corrected by Alexandre d’Arblay. 26 Hemlow, who apparently believed that these drafts were merely linguistic exercises, rather than the first versions of sent letters, excluded them from her edition. 27 There is, however, ample evidence to suggest that Burney used the corrected drafts to write letters that she duly dispatched to their intended recipients. Many of the drafts refer to letters that Burney received from her correspondents of the time, and those letters had to be answered. It is fascinating to see Burney attempting to articulate her thoughts, sometimes through multiple drafts of the same letter. On one occasion, she had to answer a note from a M. de Mory of 22 July 1803, extant in the Berg Collection, in which he offers to aid her in sending a letter to Edwyn Francis Stanhope in England: a difficult enterprise after the renewal of hostilities between France and England in June of that year. Burney drafted a short note of thanks to de Mory, which her husband rewrote

164  Peter Sabor on the verso of de Mory’s letter; Burney could then copy that revised draft in the final version of her reply. On a few other occasions, Burney sent a fair copy before her husband’s corrections had been made, recording this fact at the time. Also known to Hemlow, but unavailable to her, was a letter-book containing forty letters by Burney in French to twelve correspondents. These letters were written over a two-year period from about October 1809 to winter 1812, preceding and following Burney’s mastectomy for breast cancer in September 1811. The letter-book, formerly owned by the late Paula Peyraud, is briefly mentioned by Hemlow in the final volume of Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney. Hemlow was not given access to the letter-book, but, relying on Peyraud’s description, she was able to note cryptically that the letters ‘would have helped to fill a hiatus in the English correspondence stopped by the Napoleonic blockade; and they would have supplied additional information on [Burney’s] mastectomy of 1811, the symptoms and fears preceding the operation, and the delicacy, humanity, compassion and helpfulness of such French friends as Mme de Tessé, la princesse d’Hénin, and Mme de Maisonneuve’.28 A year after Peyraud’s death in 2008, her important collection of eighteenth-century books and manuscripts by women writers was sold by Bloomsbury Auctions in New York. McGill University bid successfully both for the ­letter-book and for several other Burney letters owned by Peyraud that will be published in AJL2. One of these, a letter of 29 January 1822 to Lady Keith’s sister Sophia Hoare, was found tipped into the first volume of her husband Henry Merrik Hoare’s copy of Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay. Sophia died in 1824, two years after receiving Burney’s letter. Her widower, who had kept it for twenty years, must have placed it in the volume, first published in 1842, where it remained undisturbed until its acquisition by McGill. Peyraud did not include it in the list of her Burney holdings and, like the auctioneer, was probably unaware of its existence. Like the French notebooks in the Berg Collection, the letter-book now at McGill contains, at the foot of each page, Alexandre d’Arblay’s corrections to Burney’s many errors in French diction and syntax. This led the cataloguer of the Peyraud Collection to speculate that the letters might have been ‘simply exercises in autobiographical epistolary form’, comparable to the thèmes, or exercises in French composition, that Burney began writing in the 1790s and continued to compose throughout her years in France. 29 It seems clear, however, that fair copies of most, if not all, of the letters in the letter-book were sent to various addresses in Paris and beyond. A case in point is an undated letter to Dominique-Jean Larrey, the celebrated army surgeon who had performed Burney’s mastectomy. The letter, which answers one from Larrey, extant in the Berg Collection, of 20 November 1811, reveals Burney’s intense admiration for the man whose medical skills had saved her life: this is far from a mere grammatical exercise.

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  165 So too is the next and final item in the McGill letter-book: a letter to Mme Saulnier (née Lacretelle), the wife of Pierre-Dieudonnée-Louis Saulnier, secrétaire général de la police in Paris since 1804. In August 1812, Alexandre d’Arblay had received Saulnier’s permission to send the manuscript of The Wanderer to Burney, who was then with their son Alexander in Dunkirk, waiting to embark for a visit to England. On hearing from her husband of Saulnier’s helpfulness and of his interest in her novels, Burney asked d’Arblay, in a letter of 8 August, to give Saulnier’s daughter a copy of Evelina, or of Cecilia if she had already read the earlier novel.30 In her journal account of the voyage from Paris to London, Burney writes that she had received advice from Mary Anne Solvyns, like Burney an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman, who told her that she ‘could do nothing more acceptable to M. de Saulnier than to present him with a copy of Evelina, in English, for his little Daughter, who was then studying that language’. 31 All this is known from letters published in Hemlow’s edition, but the newly discovered letter from Burney, asking Mme Saulnier’s permission to present her daughter with a copy of Evelina, completes the story. In AJL2, I have furnished English translations for all of Burney’s French letters. This marks a change of policy from Hemlow’s volumes, in which French material was left untranslated, despite the difficulties posed by Burney’s often erratic grammar and convoluted syntax in a language that she never fully mastered. These translations, prepared with the assistance of Caroline Boreham, are designed to make a much-­ neglected aspect of Burney’s writing fully accessible to English readers. For the single most important letter in AJL2, written by Burney in London to her husband in Paris on 18–25 May 1813, I am indebted to the historian Simon Macdonald, who found it in Paris. It has a fascinating history. It was to be delivered to d’Arblay in person by Mary Anne Solvyns, who travelled frequently between France and England and who had previously succeeded in conveying letters on behalf of Burney and others. On this occasion, Burney entrusted her not only with a voluminous letter to d’Arblay but also with a letter (in French) to d’Arblay from their son Alexander and an assortment of other items, including letters to d’Arblay from his father-in-law, Dr Charles Burney, and from his wife’s half-sister, the novelist Sarah Harriet Burney. The entire package, however, was confiscated by French authorities and would never be seen by its intended recipient. Happily, however, the letters by Burney and her son were preserved in the files of confiscated documents at the Archives nationales, and will now be published for the first time. Burney’s letter throws much new light on her life in England in 1813 and in particular on her final revisions of The Wanderer. ‘Well, my dear friend’, she tells Alexandre, I have but little satisfaction to give you, for it is not yet finished. Sketched it was, to the conclusion, before I left you—nay, before my

166  Peter Sabor illness & confinement: but, a work so long, & begun so many years ago, requires much over-looking, & correcting & arranging. The very names that I had pitched upon in the early part, were changed in the middle, & again not retained at the end.32 Burney’s ‘illness & confinement’ were in 1811; it would take a further three years until the novel was ready for publication. In revising The Wanderer, as Burney tells her husband, she paid particular attention to the novel’s style. ‘I dread Gallicisms’, she wrote, ‘& study Dr. Johnson’s Dict y. from Morning till Night’.33 Despite her constant recourse to Johnson’s Dictionary, a copy of which she had owned since 1786, contemporary reviews of The Wanderer were severely critical of its French-inflected style. The British Critic for April 1814, for instance, complained that during her long residence in France, she appears to have forgotten the common elegancies of her native tongue; and, throughout her preface, to have indulged her impartiality between the rival nations, by adopting a phraseology which is neither French nor English, but uniting the bombast of the one with the awkwardness of the other. 34 Amongst the latest of the letters in AJL2 are four written to the Reverend Charles Forster between October 1831 and January 1834. Forster was chaplain to John Jebb, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. After Jebb was seized with partial paralysis following a stroke in 1827, they left Ireland and settled first at Leamington, Warwickshire, and then at East Hill, Wandsworth, where they both became acquainted with the widowed Mme d’Arblay. In Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, Hemlow printed the only letter from Burney to Forster known to her. She was unaware that Charles Forster was the grandfather of a much more famous grandson: E. M. Forster. When the novelist died in 1970, he had in his possession a bound collection of family correspondence that included four letters to Charles Forster from Burney and one from her son Alexander, all unknown to Hemlow. Now housed with Forster’s papers at King’s College, Cambridge, these letters add considerably to our knowledge of Burney’s final years. They reveal a series of patronage networks: patronage for Alexander being sought (via his mother) from all and sundry; failed patronage from Jebb to Forster in the form of ­under-rewarded employment; and gift exchange (a kind of lower-level patronage) in the form of the circulation of books, pamphlets and bequests between all the parties. The letters also suggest that at this point in her career Burney’s engagement in these exchanges was more concerned with family piety – her memoir of her father, and her puffing of her son’s career – than with the fortunes of her own works.

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  167 The other letters printed in AJL2, addressed to a wide range of correspondents, are in a variety of locations. Three are in private hands, including the earliest item in the volume: a letter to her father written during Burney’s western tour in September 1791, two months after her departure from Court. Their owners, all known to me personally, generously provided scans of their letters as well as affording access to the originals. Photocopies of four letters for which the current locations are unknown are at the British Library. One letter, to Benjamin Waddington, was sold on eBay, which fortunately provided a scan before the manuscript, presumably bought by a private owner, disappeared. Four letters, two to Charles Burney, Jr and two to his son Charles Parr Burney, form part of a collection of several generations of Burney letters that has recently come to light at the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. A letter to Charles Parr is at Dunedin Public Library and another is at McGill University, where the Curator of Rare Books, Richard Virr, has acquired several Burney letters that have come on the market in the years since the Peyraud sale. A letter to Charles Chamier Raper, the husband of Burney’s niece Frances Phillips Raper, is at the National Archives, Kew. A note to Burney’s brother James, congratulating him on his promotion to Rear Admiral, is at the Bedfordshire Record Office. A fragmentary letter to Sarah Harriet Burney, mutilated for an autograph collector, is at the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. At the Peyraud sale, the Beinecke Library acquired a letter from Burney to an old friend, Emma Frodsham, and an important one to Burney’s father with a page of heavily obliterated material, most of which I have been able to recover. In addition to her formal journal letters, often written long after the events that they record, Burney kept diaries, memorandum books and notebooks to record her more immediate thoughts on a wide variety of subjects. A series of such pocket books is extant at the Berg Collection, covering the years 1803 to 1839. Volumes six to ten of Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney contain appendices in which this material is transcribed as far as September 1818. Surprisingly, however, no such appendices appeared in volumes eleven and twelve, although there are repeated references to the diaries in the editorial commentary; omitting them seems to have been a last-minute decision. Their absence went unnoticed by reviewers. They constitute a large body of material, beginning with a diary for October–December 1818, copied by Charlotte Barrett from a lost original, and continuing until as late as June 1839. There are copious lists of letters sent and delivered, visits made and received, financial records, tasks to be fulfilled, books read and so on. There are also some contemplative passages, often inspired by the deaths of family members and close friends. One such piece, recording Burney’s sentiments after the death of Queen Charlotte in November 1818, is of particular interest. Almost thirty years after her departure from Court, Burney still had vivid recollections of her daily meetings with the Queen:

168  Peter Sabor When I was alone with her she discarded all royal constraint, all stiffness, all formality, all pedantry of grandeur, to lead me to speak to her with openness and ease. And so successful was her graciousness, that from the moment the Page shut us up together, I felt enlivened into a spirit of discourse beyond what I felt with almost any one. All that occurred to me I said, said it with vivacity but any enquiries which she made in our Tête à têtes never awakened an idea of prying into affairs, diving into secrets, discovering views—intentions—or latent wishes, or causes.35 The sketch of which this forms part has never, I believe, been cited in biographies or studies of Queen Charlotte. Burney also wrote at some length about the unexpected arrival in England in 1819 of her closest friend during her years in France, Marie de Maisonneuve, who accompanied her brother, Victor de Latour-Maubourg, when he was posted as French ambassador to England. Although this was the last year in which Burney and her old friend would meet, their correspondence would never be interrupted; one of her final injunctions to herself, in the last surviving diary, is to ‘Write to Me de Maisonneuve’.36 The imaginative, insouciant opening of Burney’s earliest extant journal, for March 1768, with its invocation of ‘Nobody’, is well known: To Nobody, then, will I write my Journal! since To Nobody can I be wholly unreserved—to Nobody can I reveal every thought, every wish of my Heart, with the most unlimited confidence, the most unremitting sincerity to the end of my Life! For what chance, what accident can end my connections with Nobody? No secret can I conceal from No-body, and to No-body can I be ever unreserved.37 With the imminent appearance of AJL2 and the completion of all twenty-­five volumes of the journals and letters in their modern editions, this familiar passage can now, at last, be compared with the sombre opening of Burney’s final diary for 1839: Another baneful—January!! One more melancholy year let me try— since for some hidden mercy it seems granted me—hidden—for all Lifes happiness is flown with my Alexander—dearly as I yet—AS EVER—Love many—& some—still—with the warmth of a Heart open to the sacred feelings of the tenderest friendship. 38 The publication of Burney’s complete journals and letters, spanning the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries, makes, I believe, a substantial contribution to the recovery of women’s literary history, 39 a contribution enabled by the determination and skills of a twentieth-century woman, Joyce Hemlow.

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  169 After the death of her husband in 1818, Burney spent much of the last two decades of her life on two editorial projects: reworking her father’s autobiographical memoirs into the strange compilation that would be published as Memoirs of Doctor Burney (1832) while also preparing a copious selection of her own journals and letters for posthumous publication, a task in which she was considerably aided by Charlotte Barrett, who continued the editing after Burney’s death. Unlike Burney and Barrett, the modern editors of the journals and letters have had as their goal not the selecting and grooming but the recovery of the original texts. Our protracted effort to restore this material to its original form has required undoing the disfiguring editorial work of our predecessors. The resulting texts are often rougher and less elegant than those presented to the Victorian reading public, first by Barrett in 1842–6 and then by Ellis in 1889, but the material is far more comprehensive – and far closer to the original state of Burney’s journals and letters as sent to her family, friends and acquaintances during her lifetime.

Notes 1 See F. Burney, Evelina, ed. E. A. Bloom, Introduction by V. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Cecilia, ed. P. Sabor and M. A. Doody, Introduction by Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Camilla, ed. E. A. Bloom and L. D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); The Wanderer, ed. M. A. Doody, R. L. Mack and P. Sabor, Introduction by Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Several other modern editions of Evelina, though not of the other novels, are also available. 2 See The Complete Plays of Frances Burney, ed. P. Sabor, S. Cooke and G. Sill, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1995); B. Darby, Frances Burney Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late-Eighteenth-Century Stage (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); T. G. Wallace, ‘Burney as Dramatist’, in P. Sabor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 55–73; and F. Saggini, Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 3 See C. Delafield, ‘Barrett Writing Burney: A Life among the Footnotes’, in D. Cook and A. Culley (eds), Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 26–38, notes on pp. 200–204. 4 See P. Sabor, ‘Annie Raine Ellis, Austin Dobson, and the Rise of Burney Studies’, Burney Journal, 1 (1998), pp. 25–45. 5 The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame d’Arblay), 1791–1839, ed. J. Hemlow and others, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–84). 6 See L. E. Troide, ‘Joyce Hemlow and the McGill Burney Project’, in L. Clarke (ed.), A Celebration of Frances Burney (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 10–17. 7 J. Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). 8 J. Hemlow, with J. M. Burgess and A. Douglas, A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence, 1749–1878 (New York: New York Public Library, 1971), p. xvii. 9 Hemlow, A Catalogue, p. ix.

170  Peter Sabor 10 Troide, ‘Joyce Hemlow’, p. 13. See also L. E. Troide, ‘The McGill Burney Project’, Burney Journal, 2 (1999), pp. 40–52; and L. E. Troide, ‘A History and Description of the Burney Project’, Fontanus, 1 (1988), pp. 37–49. 11 See J. Hemlow, ‘Letters and Journals of Fanny Burney: Establishing the Text’, in D. I. B. Smith (ed.), Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), pp. 25–43. 12 In this essay, however, I refer to her as Burney, following the practice of all of the modern editions of her journals and letters. 13 Journals and Letters, vol. 1, p. xxix. 14 Ibid., p. vi. The observation is made in Hemlow’s Preface, dated October 1969: three years before the first two volumes of her edition were published. 15 Hemlow’s final editorial project was a selection from Burney’s later journals and letters: Fanny Burney: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. J. Hemlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). More recent selections are Frances Burney: Journals and Letters, ed. P. Sabor and L. E. Troide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), and A Known Scribbler: Frances Burney on Literary Life, ed. J. Crump (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002). 16 See A. Douglas, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Journal, A Twentieth-Century Restoration’, Library Scene, 9 (1980), pp. 8–10. 17 The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. L. E. Troide and others, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988–2012). 18 Early Journals, vol. 1, p. vii. 19 The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, 1786–1791, ed. P. Sabor and others, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011–). 20 Additional Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, ed. S. Cooke, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015). 21 Hemlow, A Catalogue, p. 98. 22 Journals and Letters, vol. 1, pp. 97–8. 23 The Queeney Letters, being letters addressed to Hester Maria Thrale by Doctor Johnson, Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi, ed. the Marquis of Lansdowne (London: Cassell, 1934). 24 See Burney’s letters to Hester Maria Thrale of 12 July 1798 and 25 May 1813; Additional Journals and Letters 2, forthcoming. See also P. Sabor, ‘Frances Burney on Hester Thrale Piozzi: “une petite histoire”’, in J. G. Swan (ed.), Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014), pp. 197–218. 25 See P. Sabor, ‘Journal Letters and Scriblerations: Frances Burney’s Life Writing in Paris’, in Women’s Life Writing, pp. 71–85, notes on pp. 211–14; K. Gemmill, ‘Frances Burney’s French Archives: Insights and Avenues’, Burney Journal, 12 (2012), pp. 74–85. 26 My transcriptions do not incorporate the copious grammatical and syntactical corrections furnished by d’Arblay; the text is based on that of the letters as originally drafted by Burney, not as revised by her husband. 27 Hemlow refers to them briefly as ‘drafts of social notes in French’ (Journals and Letters, vol. 6, p. 735), although many of the French letters are more substantial than mere notes. 28 Journals and Letters, vol. 12, p. 1000. 29 The Paula Peyraud Collection: Samuel Johnson and Women Writers in Georgian Society, sales catalogue for 6 May 2009 (New York: Bloomsbury Auctions, 2009), p. 128. 30 Journals and Letters, vol. 6, p. 690.

Publishing Frances Burney’s journals and letters  171 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., p. 709. Additional Journals and Letters, vol. 2, forthcoming. Ibid. Cited in Journals and Letters, vol. 7, p. 565. Additional Journals and Letters, vol. 2, forthcoming. Ibid. Early Journals and Letters, vol. 1, p. 2. Additional Journals and Letters, vol. 2, forthcoming. Claire Harman, author of the most recent biography of Burney, contends that ‘the systematic collation, editing and publication of Frances Burney’s journals and letters and those of members of her family […] constitutes one of the most extensive and important editorial projects of recent years’ (‘“My immense Mass of manuscripts”: Fanny Burney as Archivist, Biographer and Autobiographer’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 90:2 (Autumn 2014), pp. 15–26, on p. 25). See also C. Harman, Fanny Burney: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2000).

12 ‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’ The rationale for a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters1 Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl Owing to the enormous quantity of letters undated, the sorting has been terribly difficult, and I spent one entire winter in making up bundles and labelling each year. My grandfather made a variety of mistakes as to the dates of the letters. I hope I have atoned for some of his deficiencies, though a few mistakes are probably inevitable. He nearly blinded himself by working at night, and my grandmother had constantly to copy the letters in a large round hand to enable him to make them out. 2

Emily Climenson’s description of her laborious task of compiling an edition of her great-great-aunt Elizabeth Montagu’s correspondence surely resonates with everyone who has ever worked in archives to transcribe and order manuscript letters. Climenson was realistic about her task; she knew that many dates would remain provisional, that several letters to and by Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800) would have vanished, and thus any edition would be incomplete and contain errors. But she was buoyed by the realization that the vast number that had remained made ‘the collection unique’ (Figure 12.1).3 That remains the case. The Montagu papers have been described by Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg as ‘among the most important surviving collections from the eighteenth century’.4 Climenson, like her grandfather, merely culled selected passages for publication and framed them with a biographical narrative. She died before the task was completed and her friend, the historian Reginald Blunt, felt duty-bound to bring it to a conclusion after her death. Extracts from only about a third of the letters had been published. 5 The sheer volume of the correspondence, the fact that seven-eighths are in the Huntington Library, California, and the lack of a chronological inventory, prevented a scholarly print edition of the entire collection ever being contemplated by modern scholars. Today, digital technology makes it not only feasible but also even perfectible – for it could be added to and corrected as new letters and information become available. The digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters will be fully searchable and provide a

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  173

Figure 12.1  E  lizabeth Montagu to James Beattie, 4 April 1774, A.L. S. 6 pp; MS 30.2.C.180, University Library, King’s College, Aberdeen, editorial deletions by Forbes, partially published in Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie: Including Many of his Original Letters, 2 vols (London: Printed for E. Roper, 1824), vol. 1, p. 339.

chronological listing of the letters. Its interface and customizable tools will provide a useful research and reading experience by displaying critical notes and variants alongside the facsimile and transcription.6 This major new resource will generate more research in literature, history, art and architecture, theatre, philosophy, economics, politics and women’s history. However, a huge investment of time, money and expertise will be needed to bring it about. This essay will reflect upon our reverence for such archival sources, and face up to the practical realities that digital editing of them imposes. The first question to ask is whether the source material is important enough to warrant the scholarly effort required. In spite of the love of gadding, I shall be brought to confess that at home, with an inexhaustible ink bottle, an indefatigable pen, and an unlimited sheet of paper, I have the means of the greatest happiness your absence will allow, the young Elizabeth wrote to her friend the Duchess of Portland.7 It was once assumed that the missives of the ‘Queen of the Blue-stockings’ merely illustrated the frivolous social life of the upper classes. Actually,

174  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl from her teens until her eighties, Montagu devoted part of every day to composing business letters to the managers of her coal mines and estates and the architects, landscape and interior designers of her mansions; witty epistles to fellow female intellectuals and authors she patronized; or nuanced missives pursuing her political and religious interests within powerful dynastic circles. Montagu corresponded extensively with leaders of British Enlightenment coteries, such as Edmund Burke, Gilbert West, David Garrick and Horace Walpole, as well as the Bluestocking inner circle – Elizabeth Carter, Sarah Scott, Hannah More, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Frances Burney, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Vesey and Frances Boscawen. Like many female intellectuals, she revelled in the democratization of pen and ink: Of all fowl I love the goose best, who supplies us with her quill, surely a goose is a godly bird; if its hiss be insignificant, remember that from its side the engine is taken with which the laws are registered, and history recorded.8 Montagu’s history and indeed, the cultural history of her age, is recorded and narrated in the archives of her letters. Digitization will further democratize Montagu’s correspondence by making it freely available and, make it the ‘predominant centre of creative processes that are deployed to make sense of human experience, cultural memory and the world in general.’9 To be more specific, these letters shed light on the crucial part women played in the Enlightenment. They will also enable explorations of epistolary forms and practices, including the relationship between manuscript and print cultures.10 Moreover, the geographical, temporal and social diversity of the archive will facilitate new research into women’s social networks too. However, even as we revel in the possibilities of today’s information age, should we editors subject our own idealization of archival research to question? A return to the archives such as the Montagu Collection at the Huntington Library and the other libraries promises authenticity, originality and ‘wie es eigentlich gewesensei’ [how it actually was], according to Leopold von Ranke’s wishful dictum about historical investigation.11 It is not that we fondly imagine they will put us in direct touch with the author. We realize that exploring the original manuscript letters in their incomplete and fragile material existence, confusing order, manifold endorsements and most importantly, in terms of their predication upon absence, will never fully succeed in establishing Elizabeth Montagu’s epistolary self and her history. The ephemerality of epistolary communication is manifold. It is a generic one, as critics have already struggled with the definition of the term ‘letter’ in the eighteenth-century context where the genre ranged from the familiar letter to the commercial letter, the petition requesting patronage

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  175 or political support, the ‘public’ letter in the fashion of d’Alembert and Rousseau, and finally, to the ‘journal’ letter.12 But structurally, too, the epistle remains evocative yet elusive. In his study, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987), Jacques Derrida proposes an interminable process of movement and reception of the epistle between writer and addressee: Que veut te dire une carte postale? À quelles conditions est-elle possible? Sa destination te traverse; tu ne sais plus qui tu es. À l’instant même où de son adresse elle interpelle, toi, uniquement toi, au lieu de te joindre, elle te divise où elle t’écarte, parfois elle t’ignore. [What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are. At the very instant when from its address it interpolates, you, uniquely you, instead of reaching you it divides you or sets you aside, occasionally overlooks you.13] Derrida usefully highlights the ‘circuitous routes and detours of human communication and identity’ in this most ephemeral mode of writing.14 The quotation above unveils the relationship between the letter-writer and her reader as entirely imaginary and fundamentally impossible.15 She can only assume the addressee’s absence (‘le trou’) and the trajectory of the letter – and even then, there is no certainty. The letter might be destroyed (‘dead letter’), delayed or reach the wrong reader. By the time the (intended) reader reads the epistle, time has passed but ‘the language of absence makes [the] present by make-belief’.16 Thus, for Derrida, epistolary communication is not a closed circuit of exchange and communication but one of ephemeral indeterminacy. Nevertheless, we are eager to make sense of the epistles by creating a narrative through emplotment: narrating lived experience. Thus, we catch the excitement that comes across in Climenson’s Foreword – that the Montagu letters are a material trace of the famous Bluestocking Queen. As Arlette Farge poetically describes the taste of the archive, here we feel privileged to ‘touch reality’.17 But as follows, the archive is at the same time physical and imaginative, public and yet closed hermetically. Paul J. Voss and Marta L. Werner stress that its very nature is paradoxical: ‘The archive preserves and reserves, protects and patrols, regulates and represses.’ Ultimately the history of the archive is, ‘on the one hand a history of conversation […], on the other, a history of loss.’18 It gives us material traces and spectres of lives and memories but, at the same time, denies us the certainty of a narrative of meaning. The narrative of lived experience created thus can be constructed, censored and possibly displaced.19 Derrida confirms that:

176  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation. 20 For Michel Foucault the archive metaphor was: ‘the first law of what can be said’. 21 In publishing an archive extremely relevant to women’s history, we draw upon the authority of the past for today’s feminism: we seek out and highlight the absences and possibly the enforced silences. We do not regard the archive as merely a sepulchre of outmoded ideologies. We agree with Foucault that it is also a centre of circulation – with the potential to generate new insights and strategies despite its inherent instability: the archive deploys its possibilities […] on the basis of the very discourses that have just ceased to be ours: its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practice. 22 This belatedness awakens our consciousness of past ideologies preserved in forms of discourse. Our exploitation of the virtual reality of digitization paradoxically reminds us that physical means of inscription and methods of preserving discourse in writing have just ‘ceased to be ours’ too. Derrida stresses: ‘Archival meaning is in advance co-determined by the structure that archives’ – now digitization shapes knowledge formation for the future. 23 So handwritten letters, postcards, notebooks, diaries, account books, ledgers, pen and ink, the postal system, cursive handwriting, the printed book and even the library itself have now been rendered archaic – they are a collection of items. The old tools are no longer used to conserve but are themselves the object of conservation. As antiquarians of old scrutinized scrolls, tablets and stelae, today we are suddenly fascinated by the aura that surrounds the physicality and materiality of writing on paper – its spaces, places, cultural practices, representation, tools and the symbolization these carry with them as they disappear into history. To archive is to uphold the past, present and future, ‘to die is to be disconnected from access to the archives, not jacked-in or not in real time.’24 *** Derrida argued that electronic mail was transforming the public and private binary. 25 Digitizing eighteenth-century correspondence certainly inverts the conventional distinction between public and private paper correspondence. This leads us to ask whether we can rightly describe the collection as an archive at all, owing to the gendering of the concept.

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  177 Derrida devotes much attention to the etymology of the word ‘archive’ from the Latin Archium, archivum – or ἀρχεῖον (arkheion) in Greek – a house or domicile – whose resident has the power to make law. Indeed, as Voss and Werner remind us, ‘the concept of an archive also has links to the essentially private, hermetic spaces of the cloister, carrel, almarie.’26 This private, hermetically sealed trace is revealed by and in relationship to the archivist. 27 ‘The archive may be, in effect, a political space, a gendered space, a memorial space.’28 The concept of a magisterial residence indicates a public office or a government place where official historical records are kept. Derrida observes the word implies firstly physis (Nature personified or the inherent quality of a being or object), thus channelling material power, and secondly the principle of the commandment. 29 In other words, like holy relics, the archived objects have been selected or collected because they are the things themselves and bear traces of human transactions. Derrida acknowledges, ‘this archic – in truth patriarchic – function, without which no archive would ever come into play’.30 In the nineteenth century, it was axiomatic that legal and administrative records were superior to personal papers or eyewitness accounts, being empirical evidence.31 This model of history was based on the bureaucratic nation-state and its imperial role. Sir Hilary Jenkinson (1892–1961) – autocratic mandarin of the British public record office – defined an archive solely as state ‘documents which formed part of an official transaction and were preserved for official reference’, though he recognized that personal papers had secondary value as a complement.32 This is to reiterate the Roman concept of res publica as opposed to the private life of the social and sexual individual. But as Habermas has argued, the Enlightenment public sphere and its critique of government paved the way for democracy.33 It was a republic of letters in which correspondence – whether published or not – acted as the counterpart to conversation and civic sociability. Elite women took a leading part in the public sphere salons, in maintaining epistolary networks, and in circulating, copying, preserving and storing valued letters. Kinship networks, civic associations and philanthropy served society and they needed active maintenance through correspondence. Susan Dalton argues that ‘literary commerce, to send news, books, literature – even compliments and criticism – was to show one’s commitment to the community as a whole’.34 As scholars of women’s writing, we would agree that official archives have traditionally been used to support patriarchal authority and priorities. In that sense, Marlene Manoff comments, women’s studies may be defined as ‘a project to write women back into the historical record – to fill the gaps and correct the omissions in the archive’. 35 But, as we have been arguing, the nature of the archive and what it can do will itself change through the inclusion of female correspondence. We also realize

178  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl that digitization will require a revaluation of traditional scholarly practices and priorities. *** The myriad of personal papers surviving outside the archives of official power, in homes, in the forms of diaries and letters, have not often been professionally curated, as was the case with official papers deposited in archives. If not deliberately destroyed by descendants to preserve the family’s good name, they provided primary material for biographers to recycle in print when illustrating a famous individual’s selfhood. For example, William Godwin published his wife Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to her former lover Gilbert Imlay purely for their literary quality: The following letters may possibly be found to contain the finest examples of the language of sentiment and passion ever presented to the world […]. The Editor apprehends that, in the judgement of those best qualified to decide upon the comparison, these letters will be admitted to have the superiority over the fiction of Goethe. They are the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe. 36 However, he destroyed the originals– having achieved print publication – so we have no way of knowing what was altered, censored or omitted. The difference between a public and private letter is not acknowledged in the Posthumous Works – Wollstonecraft’s most private letters to her lover, and business letters to her publisher, are juxtaposed with her drafts for epistolary book projects such as Letters on the Management of Infants or a political polemic such as Letter on the Present Character of the French Nation. All the manuscripts are considered preliminary to, and of less value than, the print publication he felt Wollstonecraft deserved. The Bluestockings were themselves pioneering editors of private correspondence, as manuscript letters began to be valued as documents validating the new discipline of English Literature and its idealization of geniuses. Hester Thrale Piozzi stated her editorial policy was accurate transcription of Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson: ‘The letters […] remain just as he wrote them, and I did not like to mutilate such as either contained sallies of humour or precepts of morality, because they might be mingled with family affairs’. 37 For modern critics the edition is ‘textually unreliable’, but, for her era, Thrale was relatively respectful of the original documents. Her title makes a point of the authenticity of the letters, published ‘from the original mss. in her possession’. She feels that correspondence has been undervalued:

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  179 It has been frequently lamented that we have few letters in our language printed from genuine copies – scarce any from authors of eminence; such as were prepared for the press by their writers, have forfeited all title to the name of letters, nor are I believe ever considered as familiar chat spread upon paper for the advantage or entertainment of a distant friend.38 But she felt readers might ‘prefer the native thoughts and unstudied phrases […] to the more laboured elegance of his other works’. 39 Anna Barbauld undertook the Herculean task of editing Samuel Richardson’s letters. She was frank on the need to balance the commercial constraints of satisfying the prurient curiosity of readers about what famous authors were really like and the ethics of exposing the private lives of living individuals: Mr Phillips purchased them [the letters] at a very liberal price; he trusts for remuneration to the curiosity of the public, which has always shown an eagerness, more natural perhaps than strictly justifiable, to penetrate into the domestic retirements, and to be introduced to the companionable hours of eminent characters. That this inclination may be gratified without impropriety, care has been taken that no letters should be published of any living character, except the correspondence of Mrs Duncombe, (formerly Miss Highmore) which that lady had had the goodness to communicate herself.40 What is considered significant enough to conserve, and why, is subject to debate and to change. In the eighteenth century, Bluestocking editors were in the vanguard of identifying a canon of English Literature. While they preserved the correspondence of male geniuses, Godwin attempted to treat Wollstonecraft in the same way. In the twenty-first century, feminists are cultural historians – interested in creating digital archives of women’s writing not only to rescue great authors from oblivion and to edit their texts, but to study how women connected in social groups. Noelle A. Baker and Sandy H. Petrulionis challenge the editors of today to look beyond the canon: How should we evaluate the fragmented writings of less celebrated figures? How do their damaged, coded or recently accessible texts shed light on the varied traditions of women’s writing? How might emerging theories of digital archival environments enable us to interpret and represent the physical features of […] manuscripts, their layered scribal witnesses, mixed genres and non-linear structure?41 A searchable digital edition of varied correspondence like Montagu’s is ideal for research into epistolary networks: it will enable us to plot

180  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl friendship circles geographically, temporally, by class and gender and through language and style. For, as Marie-Laure Ryan suggests: A truly digital text, or narrative, is one that cannot be transferred into the print medium without significant loss. It depends on the computer as a sustaining environment, and it uses the screen (or any other display device) as a stage for performance.42 The edition will not merely reproduce the features of a print edition but will enable such dynamic interaction through digitization. The research possibilities of the correspondence will depend on the encoding methods used to produce machine-readable texts, conformable to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international and interdisciplinary standard that since 1994 has ‘been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation.’43 TEI opens up scholarly claims about Montagu’s letters in a complex but meticulous manner. We would argue that feminist construction of digital archives is therefore conservative yet also revolutionary work which preserves traces of women’s history yet lays the foundation for new disciplines and new areas of knowledge.44 As Derrida comments, archivization ‘produces as much as it records the event’.45 *** So, how far will our edition contribute to the democratization of the archive? Digitization has provided research tools, which have brought rare texts out of the control of professional archivists. Anyone who has visited their local record office will know that the archive is no longer an inner sanctum of civil service regulation, but buzzing with life – the focus of twenty-first-century ancestor worship. As Paul Ricoeur says, ‘The archive is not just a physical or spatial place, it is also a social one’.46 Feminists have been in the forefront of this immense change to scholarship since the 1980s – unearthing women’s writing from the special collections and making it directly available through reprints and digitization: often entirely bypassing the canon mediated to the reader via publishers, literary institutions and academic scholarly editors. It is arguable that there is no need to transfer editorial practices that evolved for print to texts made available through new media.47 Digital images of the Montagu manuscript letters could be published without the painstaking work of diplomatic transcription. Readers could engage directly with images of the letters. In other words, we now need to distinguish between a digital edition and a virtual archive. Any form of classification or mapping of the archive is an act of authority that ‘open[s] up new avenues in it to the material, yet it also closes off others.’48 But an unordered archive would be the archivist’s nightmare, ‘one in which scholars and archivists journey

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  181 through the library in the search of some ultimate order or meaning, some mystical revelation.’49 The Montagu Project’s aim is to exploit new possibilities for the genre of the scholarly edition through the collaboration of a group of experts in editing and digital humanities. Our edition can minimize elitism by offering the viewer the availability but not the necessity of consulting explanatory notes and scholarly apparatus. We are involving a spectrum of potential users, whether academics, students or members of the public, from the very beginning – through crowdsourcing the transcription of letters (to be checked by the general editors). Thus the editing process as well as digital access to images of the Montagu manuscripts will create a dynamic teaching tool (see Appendix). Ideally, though, this should go hand in hand with paying attention to the physical objects themselves. Close examination of watermarks, ink, fold-marks and seals of manuscript letters yields information often missed by the camera. In the same way, particular books have annotations; the paratext and advertisements may convey valuable information. Objects have their own integrity, which is not easily reproduced: for example, women often kept commonplace books of extracts and drawings in manuscript. Nevertheless, digitization can achieve not just the democratization of accessing rare texts and secret diaries without travelling to the archive, but facilitate the most arcane scholarly work of collating manuscripts that are physically remote from one another. 50 *** There are hundreds of Montagu letters cared for in Britain in the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, university libraries at Aberdeen, Manchester, Nottingham, the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, at Cornell University and the Houghton Library, Harvard. Other collections of Montagu letters are still in private archives, for example the Longleat archive. The Princeton Collection of the correspondence between Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Reynolds (with one letter from Edmund Burke) was purchased by the Library in 1967 at the Sotheby sale of 27 November (lot 196) and originally had been in the possession of Doreen Ashworth, a descendant of Mary Reynolds Palmer, Frances Reynolds’s sister.51 However, the vast majority of the manuscripts are held at the Huntington Library, California. Here the letters are in use constantly, according to curator Sue Hodson. They are in good condition – for paper quality was better in the eighteenth century than the nineteenth and Montagu insisted on good paper. She patronized a female stationer and bookseller and wrote to Messenger Monsey on 28 August 1757: Pray send in my name to Mrs. Denoyer’s at the Golden Bible in Lisle Street for an 100 of the best pens, and half a ream of the finest

182  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl and thinnest quarto paper ungilt, and let them come down in your portmanteau.52 But of course digitization would help preserve these finest and thinnest papers. There are 6,923 pieces (chiefly letters) in the Huntington Library – arranged in 117 boxes plus one album containing 5–7 images, making a total of c. 6,930 items to be scanned. Many of the letters consist of multiple pages as Montagu’s letters are longer than average, so the estimate of total images needed is 37,094. Descriptions of each letter appear on the front of each folder for each piece (name of correspondent, date, place of writing and so on). The front of each folder must also be scanned to capture the descriptive metadata. This makes a total of 44,024 scans. It is a huge amount of work – estimated at a total of 1,950 hours to digitize everything and will disrupt the running of the library for many months – but this is nothing to the amount of work which would have been involved if the letters had not been concentrated into one main archive. This, and the good will of the Huntington Library, make the project feasible. Digitizing Montagu’s manuscript letters will benefit many scholars in eighteenth-century studies who are currently forced to travel to the USA and who are duplicating transcriptions. The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800): Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition has brought them together to pool their work and to organize transcriptions of manuscript letters by amateur historians and students eager to be involved. Metadata management will append the provenance and repository of the manuscripts to the image. Transcription metadata will identify and clarify transcription methodologies. This project raises the question of the editors’ aims in their presentation of the letters, which were informed by Thomas G. Tanselle’s reflections: In the first place, an editor’s primary responsibility is to establish a text; whether his goal is to reconstruct that form of the text which represents the author’s final intention or some other form of the text, his essential task is to produce a reliable text according to some set of principles. Relegating all editorial matter to an appendix and allowing the text to stand by itself serves to emphasize the primacy of the text and permits the reader to confront the literary work without the distraction of editorial comment and to read the work with ease. A second advantage of a clear text is that it is easier to quote from or to reprint. Although no device can insure accuracy of quotation, the insertion of symbols (or even footnote numbers) into a text places additional difficulties in the way of the quoter. Furthermore, most quotations appear in contexts where symbols are inappropriate; thus when it is necessary to quote from a text which has not been kept clear of apparatus, the burden of producing a clear text of the passage is placed on the quoter. 53

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  183 The transcription methodology required extensive discussions and decisions. Peter Robinson notes: ‘To transcribe a manuscript is to select, to amalgamate, to divide, to ignore, to highlight, to edit.’54 For it would be impossible to produce truly non-critical transcriptions, ones that ‘transcribe’, ‘reproduce’ and ‘present’ the original. 55 We decided on a diplomatic transcription. However, our digital edition will allow the reader to view the image of the manuscript letter with a zoom tool, juxtaposed with a clear reading text, with access to full critical apparatus if required.56 Perhaps the most vexed question we pose ourselves is how far digitization of the manuscripts can hope to preserve the originals. It is salutary to consider whether the new medium makes an inherently flawed form of archive, inferior to paper. Letters were valued in the eighteenth century and carefully stored. Conservation could be achieved by threading them together on thread or wire: Latin for which is filum – therefore a file. Alternatively, they were folded into neat rectangles and endorsed by a note on the back as to recipient and contents. Then bundles of letters were stored methodically in desks and chests. Elizabeth Vesey was particularly anxious about Elizabeth Carter’s correspondence and wrote: I have not been able to find much less to select Mrs Carter’s letters […] Those fine ones I mention’d are lock’d up in a saving Box in Ireland particularly that wrote upon her return from Miss Talbot’s funeral which one day will touch the Heart & improve the religious feelings of Posterity.57 Sometimes they were protected by being bound into a codex or letter-­ book and this is the case with some of the Montagu family letters in the British Library. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the custom arose to store letters flat between boards. It was usual for letters to be returned to the originator on the recipient’s death, and so, because Montagu was so long-lived and because she had also carefully kept and sometimes copied the letters she had received from her friends, the collection was extensive when she died. Montagu asked Elizabeth Vesey once to return her letters: ‘I wish you wd send me some of my letters back I mean such as you have read, I want the letters for a friend, I wd have only such as are copied, the originals are hardly legible.’58 The great majority of the letters were inherited and curated by Matthew Montagu, 4th Baron of Rokeby, nephew of Elizabeth Montagu and executor of her estate. From 1809–13 he published four volumes of extracts from the correspondence of the first forty years of her life. Like Montagu Pennington, the nephew of Elizabeth Carter, and publisher of her and Catherine Talbot’s correspondence, Matthew Montagu was deliberately affirming the value of Bluestocking learning by creating his aunt’s afterlife in extracts from her letters, in a decade when the backlash

184  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl against female intellectuals was at its height. The Quarterly Review, notorious for savaging Anna Barbauld and Lady Morgan, sneered that despite ‘considerable comic powers’ Elizabeth Montagu dealt in ‘stale, pedantic morality’ with ‘that very learned, very excellent and very tiresome person, Mrs Elizabeth Carter’. 59 In 1899, the letters passed into the hands of Matthew Montagu’s granddaughter Emily J. Climenson, who was just then publishing extracts from another eighteenth-century manuscript source: Passages from the Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys of Hardwick House AD 1756–1808 (1899). She brought out another two volumes of Montagu extracts, taking the memoir up to 1761. Her death in 1921 saw Climenson’s friend Mr Reginald Blunt, a historian of Chelsea, completing the task in 1923. He would go on to publish a biography of Thomas, Lord Lyttelton in 1936. Other family papers from 1761 to the end of Mrs Montagu’s life were used by Dr John Doran, an experienced biographer and editor, to provide a further selection of correspondence, which he printed with remarks of his own in biographical form, in 1873, under the title A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu) illustrated in her unpublished Letters. He also published an extra-illustrated twelve-volume edition of it the same year.60 The aim of these editors was to construct a chronological biographical account piecing together extracts of anecdotes of upper-class life. They were cavalier in using manuscript sources. Occasionally they would splice together extracts from different letters or censor them. Even Doran acknowledged in his dedication of A Lady of the Last Century that he had compiled a ‘bit of mosaic’.61 Crucially, though, they refrained from destroying the letters as each selection saw print. The main collection of correspondence was then sold to the American rare book dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach, who in 1925 sold it in turn to the railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington. Huntington was at the end of his life, and decided to turn his personal book and manuscript collection into a research institution on his estate in Pasadena, California, which would survive into the future. He therefore began buying up entire collections wholesale rather than individual items – the larger the better. So he must have been delighted with the Montagu letters. Endowing the library with the enormous annual budget of $400,000 p.a. he declared of his archive: ‘Its value to the world will depend chiefly upon what it produces’.62 The card catalogue his librarian used to record recipients of more than ten of Montagu’s letters alphabetically is still in use today, though an online electronic finding aid is now available at the Online Archive of California www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf767nb23s/entire_text/. The Montagu archive at the Huntington Library is an example of the institutionalization of a private archive not by the state but by an entrepreneur/connoisseur: with the charitable purpose of encouraging research inextricably bound to the aim of preserving his estate and keeping his collection together.

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  185 The Montagu correspondence has informed recent pioneering research on female intellectuals of the Enlightenment by Elizabeth Eger, Nicole Pohl, Betty Schellenberg, Harriet Guest, Emma Major, Deborah Heller, Norma Clarke and others, and offering electronic access to the archive will inspire even more. Emma Major has eloquently described studying the Montagu letters in the Huntington Library: The privilege of using manuscript letter collections means that layers of editing are made visible. Passages and names that descendants or editors thought should be permanently erased had been struck out in thick ink, while the different forms of handwriting that Montagu had used for her fair copies of earlier letters highlighted the careful self-preservation involved in her epistolary practice. She adds encouragingly: Scholarly modern editions of the correspondence, such as those now underway for Montagu and her sister Sarah Scott will enable scholars to engage more directly and fully with those writers’ epistolary lives.63 Democratizing the archive and facilitating research on it is what a ­digitized scholarly edition can brilliantly achieve. But let us consider the distinct possibility that our virtual edition may prove as, if not more, fragile and degradable than the original papers. It could be said that ­today’s ­digitization frenzy is not too far different from ­eighteenth-­century ­bibliomania. However, our belated realization of the instability and ­fragility of the digital archive we are creating conjures up an even more unsettling historical analogy. Perhaps today’s digital humanities ­scholars are re-enacting the role of medieval scribes in the monastery library with our endless copying of past papers, while the arch-vandal Time is at the door and may well destroy our work. We cannot guarantee the ­immortality of the copies we make, and maybe we will leave less trace of our electronic correspondence than Montagu did. As Michael J. Paulus points out: But now, with the proliferation of digital materials, dispersed and uncurated, the traditional positions of libraries within the archival cycle are problematic. Physical storage media need to be preserved, to maintain the integrity of the bits that reside on them, and the logical ordering of the bits needs to be preserved, to make them ‘renderable’ or readable in the future. There is also the bigger and more basic question of responsibility: who will save what, when, how, and where? Common computer applications and uses do not do much to support long-term access, therefore digital materials are at risk if they are not proactively curated.64

186  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl Libraries and archives have to reposition themselves within the archival cycle – to adopt responsibility for creating and distributing as well as merely conserving.65 But many digital scholarly resources have proved all too ephemeral as they need constant updating to remain accessible. In our own case, the Huntington Library actively supports our digitization to help preserve its fragile papers by making images of them all, so we can virtually reassemble and re-order the collection, bringing it back to the UK through mediated images of the letters. Swansea University has offered to host the edition, and its Department of Information Services and Systems will design, build and – crucially – maintain a platform specifically for freely accessible scholarly digital editions, beginning with The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800): Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition. The Elizabeth Montagu Project has benefitted from generous grants by AHRC and other funders to bring together a network of experts in literary editing and digital humanities, librarians and archivists who have helped us thrash out some of the theoretical and practical problems discussed in this essay. Long-term sustainability is planned for; it is our main priority, so that the letters benefit from further metadata developments and advances in digital analysis. For arguably, although today we can communicate instantly across the world wide web, we have found no way to better preserve writing than the physical paper archive, which – by no means redundant – magically combines the material and the immortal. This realization at least prevents us from the hubris of presentism. We are spurred on by the awareness that a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters will need to be invested with the highest quality of scholarship, in order to justify the amount of work it will take to build, and especially by its perpetual maintenance and improvement, if it is to survive far into the future.

Appendix: Selected Editorial Principles THE MASTER INVENTORY (metadata for every letter/ person) •

• • •

It creates and maintains a unique identifier and metadata structure for every document and person – this is the Control File/Master Index for the Montagu project – all decisions regarding the metadata of the project must be registered here. It will become an online database for everyone to consult. Editing will be limited by password to assigned editor or editors. Letters must have an entry before transcribing.

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  187 Transcribing The letters are presented in a diplomatic transcription of the originals: • • • • • • •

• • • • •

They retain historical punctuation, abbreviations (ye, wd), spellings, misspellings and deletions. The use of lower and upper case is reproduced faithfully. Superscripts and subscripts are retained. If a final period has been inadvertently omitted, we will introduce one in square brackets [.], as web browsers collapse multiple white spaces into one. Valedictory remarks, regardless of how they appear, will be placed at the end of each letter on the right side, with line breaks as appropriate. Postscripts are reproduced as they appear in the original document. The en dash (or en rule), rather than a hyphen, must be used to indicate a closed range of values – a range with clearly defined and finite upper and lower boundaries – roughly signifying what might otherwise be communicated by the word ‘through’. Use full numbers for page references in annotation, dates, etc. e.g. 110–115 not 110–5. Include a space before and a space after an em rule (i.e. a full dash). When notecalls occur next to punctuation, they always appear after punctuation. For example ‘Word.’5 Font size and style does not matter (with the exception of superscript and subscript) as it will all be standardized in the process of digitization. One document = one letter, do not have more than one transcript per word document.

Prefatory materials (header) • •

Document IDno. APE (Address, Postmarks, Endorsements).

Palaeography and aids to reading •

All unusual characters (e.g. alchemical, astrological etc.) are presented as full Unicode characters.

Postal markings •

Postal markings identify franking and directions. These are recorded as Montagu and her correspondents used them.

188  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl

Notes 1 H. Lynch Piozzi, Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, to which are Added Some Poems Never before Printed, Published from the Original MSS. in her Possession, 2 vols (London: A. Strachan and T. Cadell, 1788), vol. 1, p. ii. 2 Elizabeth Montagu, The Queen of the Blue-Stockings, Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. E. J. Climenson, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1906), vol. 1, p. vii. 3 The Queen of the Blue-Stockings, vol. 1, p. vii. 4 ODNB. 5 There were eight volumes of extracts in all: Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, ed. M. Montagu, 4 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1809–13); Elizabeth Montagu, The Queen of the Blue-Stockings, Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761, ed. E. J. Climenson, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1906); Mrs Montagu ‘Queen of the Blues’: Her Letters and Friendships from 1762–1800, ed. R. Blunt, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1923). 6 General Editors of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800): Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition are Professor Caroline Franklin, Professor Michael J. Franklin and Professor Nicole Pohl. 7 To the Duchess of Portland, Mount Morris, 18 July 1739, Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, vol. 1 (1809), p. 58. 8 To the Duchess of Portland, Tunbridge Wells, 3 September 1745, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, vol. 3 (1813), p. 14. 9 E. Van Alphen, Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 9. 10 Following the work of D. Goodman and K. Wellman, The Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); S. Knott and B. Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); C. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and M. Bigold, Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn and Elizabeth Carter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 11 L. von Ranke, ‘Vorrede’, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535 (Leipzig: Reimer, 1824), p. vi. 12 R. Halsband, P. Riberette and C. A. Porter, ‘On Editing Chateaubriand’s Correspondence’, Yale French Studies: Men/Women of Letters, 71 (1986), pp. 131–47; W. M. Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); C. Porter, ‘Foreword’, Yale French Studies: Men/Women of Letters, 71 (1986), pp. 1–14; K. Stewart, ‘Towards Defining an Aesthetic for the Familiar Letter in Eighteenth-Century England’, Prose Studies, 5 (September 1982), pp. 179–92. 13 J. Derrida, La Carte Postale de Socrate à Freud (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), le 17 Novembre 1979; A. Bass (trans.), J. Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) [n.p. dust jacket]. 14 D. Couisineau, Letters and Labyrinths: Women Writing/Cultural Codes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), p. 35.

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  189 15 Decker suggests that ‘familiar letter writing is an intensely metonymic discourse inasmuch as it typically abounds in the registry of quotidian “realist” minutiae that become more or less explicitly significant in reference to the addressee’s absence (the occasion of the letter’s composition)’, see p. 15. 16 J. G. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 140. 17 ‘Toucher le réel’, see A. Farge, Le gout de l’archive (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1989), p. 18. 18 P. J. Voss and M. L. Werner, ‘Towards a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 32:1 (Spring 1999), pp. i–vii, on p. i. 19 See also M. Featherstone, ‘Archive’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:2–3 (May 2006), pp. 591–6. 20 J. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 4. 21 M. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1969; repr. 1972), p. 129. 22 Ibid., p. 147. 23 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 18. See also pp. 18–29. 24 A. Mackenzie, ‘The Mortality of the Virtual: Real-Time, Archive and DeadTime in Information Networks’, Convergence, 3:2 (June 1997), pp. 59–71, on p. 66. 25 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 17. 26 Voss and Werner, p. i. 27 See Farge, pp. 15–16. 28 Voss and Werner, p. i. 29 OED. 30 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 2. 31 See C. Williams, ‘Personal Papers: Perceptions and Practices’, in L. Craven (ed.), What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 53–68, on p. 58. 32 The American archivist Theodore R. Schellenberg made archivists responsible for determining what constituted the secondary value in non-official papers that should be preserved. See P. C. Franks, Records and Information Management (Chicago IL: American Library Association Press, 2013), p. 263. 33 See J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans.) T. Burger with F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); J. Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’ (trans.) T. Burger, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 421–61. 34 S. Dalton, Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2003), p. 7. 35 M. Manoff, ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4:1 (2004), pp. 9–25, on p. 15. See also A. D. Gordon, ‘Experiencing Women’s History as a Documentary Editor’, Documentary Editing, 31 (2010), pp. 1–9. 36 Memoirs and Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. W. Godwin, 2 vols (Dublin: Thomas Burnside, 1798), vol. 1, p. 118. 37 Piozzi, Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, vol. 1, p. v. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. vi.

190  Caroline Franklin and Nicole Pohl 40 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, selected from the original manuscripts, ed. Mrs Barbauld, 6 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), vol. 1, p. v. 41 N. A. Baker and S. H. Petrulionis, ‘The “Almanacks” of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition’, Documentary Editing, 31 (2010), pp. 10–24, on p. 23. 42 M. Ryan, ‘Multivariant Narratives’, in S. Schreibman, R. Siemens and J. Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 415–30, on p. 416. www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/. 43 www.tei-c.org/index.xml. For advantages/disadvantages of TEI, see E. Vanhoutte, ‘Electronic Textual Editing: Prose Fiction and Modern Manuscripts: Limitations and Possibilities of Text-Encoding for Electronic Editions’, www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/vanhoutte.xml. There is a TEI Special Interest Group on Correspondence and the Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders project (DALF) that has extended TEI to make it particularly useful for letters. http://ctb.kantl.be/project/dalf/ dalfdoc/­introduction.html. 4 4 See Women Writers Project’s publications on encoding women’s historical documents: www.wwp.northeastern.edu/research/publications/; the Project Orlando: http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svDocumentation?formname=t&d_id=MARKUP; and H. M. Schilperoot, ‘Feminist Markup and Meaningful Text Analysis in Digital Literary Archives’, Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal) (2015), Paper 1228. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ libphilprac/1228. 45 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 16. Edward Vanhoutte has argued for a hierarchical use of the archival and the editorial: By Archival Function I mean the preservation of the literary artefact in its historical form and the historical-critical research of a literary work. Museum Function I define as the presentation by an editor of the physical appearance and/or the contents of the literary artefact in a documentary, aesthetic, sociological, authorial or bibliographical contextualization, intended for a specific public and published in a specific form and lay-out. The digital archive should be the place for the first function, showing a relative objectivity, or a documented subjectivity in its internal organization and encoding. The Museum Function should work in an edition – disregarding its external form – displaying the explicit and expressed subjectivity and the formal orientation of the editor. The relationship between these two functions is hierarchical: there is no Museum Function without an Archival Function and an edition should always be based on a digital archive. See ‘Where is the editor? Resistance in the Creation of an Electronic Critical Edition’, Human IT, 3:1 (1999), pp. 197–214, on p. 176. 46 P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), p. 167. 47 This topic is discussed by E. Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), Chapter 1. 48 Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 593. 49 Ibid., p. 594. 50 See for example, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts www.janeausten.ac.uk/ index.html. 51 R. Wendorf and C. Ryskamp, ‘A Blue-stocking Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Reynolds in the Princeton Collection’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 41 (1979–80), pp. 173–207.

‘An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger’  191 52 Elizabeth Montagu, Letters of Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents (1813), vol. 4, p. 153. 53 T. G. Tanselle, ‘Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus’, Studies in Bibliography, 25 (1972), pp. 41–88, on pp. 45–6. 54 P. Robinson, ‘Manuscript Politics’, in W. Chernaik, C. Davis and M. Deegan (eds), The Politics of the Electronic Text, Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 3 (1993), on p. 10. 55 A. Renear, ‘Literal Transcription: Can the Text Ontologist Help?’, in D. Fiormonte and J. Usher (eds), New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications: Proceedings of the First Seminar ‘Computers, Literature and Philology’, Edinburgh, 7–9 September, 1998 (Oxford: Humanities Computing Unit, 2001), pp. 23–30, on p. 24. 56 Edward Vanhoutte suggests that even a digital edition is of course problematic in itself and creates new ontologies of the text. E. Vanhoutte and R. Van den Branden, ‘Describing, Transcribing, Encoding, and Editing Modern Correspondence Material: A Textbase Approach’, Lit Linguist Computing, 24:1 (2009), pp. 77–98. 57 Elizabeth Vesey to Elizabeth Carter, 25 January 1781, The University of Manchester Library, Mary Hamilton Papers, Ham/1/56/2/3. 58 Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Vesey, The Huntington Library, Montagu Collection, MO 6557. 59 Quarterly Review, 10 (October 1813), pp. 31–41, on pp. 36–8. 60 One copy is at Princeton, Rare Books and Special Collections [(Ex) 3862.7.64]. 61 J. Doran, A Lady of the Last Century (Mrs Elizabeth Montagu): Illustrated in her Unpublished Letters, Collected and Arranged with a Biographical Sketch and a Chapter on Blue Stockings (London: R. Bentley and Son, 1873), p. iii. 62 J. Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 507. 63 E. Major, Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 83. 64 M. J. Paulus Jr., ‘Reconceptualising Academic Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 11:4 (2011), pp. 939–52, on p. 946. 65 Ibid. See also Edward Vanhoutte, ‘Resistance’.

Selected works cited

Baker, N. A. and S. H. Petrulionis, ‘The “Almanacks” of Mary Moody ­E merson: A Scholarly Digital Edition’, Documentary Editing, 31 (2010), pp. 10–24. Ballaster, R. and others, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991). Batchelor, J., Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Benstock, S., ‘At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text’, PMLA, 98:2 (March 1983), pp. 204–225. Bigold, M., Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century: Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn and Elizabeth Carter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Binhammer, K., The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Blain, V., P. Clements and I. Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Batsford, 1990). Bornstein, G. and R. G. Williams (eds), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1993). Brant, C., Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Bullard, R., The Politics of Disclosure 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). Butler, M., ‘Editing Women’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, 27:3 (1995), pp. 273–83. Chernaik, W., C. Davis and M. Deegan (eds), The Politics of the Electronic Text, Office for Humanities Communication Publications, 3 (Oxford: Office for Humanities Communication, 1993). Clarke, N., The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004). Cook, D. and A. Culley (eds), Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Couisineau, D., Letters and Labyrinths: Women Writing/Cultural Codes (­Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). Craciun, A., British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Selected works cited  193 Craven, L. (ed.), What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008). Curran, S., ‘Different Demands, Different Priorities: Electronic and Print Editions’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 82–8. Delery, C. J., ‘The Subject Presumed to Know: Implied Authority and Editorial Apparatus’, TEXT, 5 (1991), pp. 63–80. Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Ellis, M., The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ezell, M. J. M., ‘Editing Early Modern Women’s Manuscripts: Theory, Electronic Editions, and the Accidental Copy-Text’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 102–9. Featherstone, M., ‘Archive’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:2–3 (May 2006), pp. 591–6. Fiormonte D. and J. Usher (eds), New Media and the Humanities: Research and Applications: Proceedings of the First Seminar ‘Computers, Literature and Philology’, Edinburgh, 7–9 September, 1998 (Oxford: Humanities Computing Unit, 2001). Foucault, M., Archaeology of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1969; rep. 1972). Fraistat, N. and J. Flanders (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Franks, P. C., Records and Information Management (Chicago, IL.: American Library Association Press, 2013). Gabler, H. W., ‘Theorizing the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Literature Compass, 7:2 (2010), pp. 43–56. Gamer, M., Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Gordon, A. D., ‘Experiencing Women’s History as a Documentary Editor’, Documentary Editing, 31 (2010), pp. 1–9. Greg, W. W., ‘The Rationale of the Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography, 3 (1950–1), pp. 19–37. Greg, W. W., The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Griffin, R. J. (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Halsband, R., P. Riberette and C. A. Porter, ‘On Editing Chateaubriand’s Correspondence’, Yale French Studies, 71 (1986), pp. 131–47. Hawkins, A. R. (ed), Romantic Women Writers Reviewed, 9 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011–13). Hurley, A. Hollinshead and C. Goodblatt (eds), Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Hutchison, A. M. (ed.), Editing Women: Papers given at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3–4 November 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).

194  Selected works cited Ingrassia, C. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jacobus, M. (ed.), Women Writing and Writing about Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Jones, V. (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800 (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kanner, B. P. (ed.), Women in Context: Two Hundred Years of British Women Autobiographers (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997). Knott, S. and B. Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Kowaleski-Wallace, E., Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth & Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Labbe, J. M., Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Labbe, J. M. (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750–1830: Volume 5 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Mack, D. S., ‘Editing Different Versions of Romantic Texts’, Yearbook of ­English Studies, The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles 29 (1999), pp. 176–90. Mackenzie, A., ‘The Mortality of the Virtual: Real-Time, Archive and DeadTime in Information Networks’, Convergence, 3:2 (June 1997), pp. 59–71. Major, E., Madam Britannia: Women, Church and Nation 1712–1812 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Manoff, M., ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4:1 (2004), pp. 9–25. McGann, J. J., A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). McGann, J. J., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago, IL: ­University of Chicago Press, 1985). McGann, J. J., The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). McKenzie, D. F., Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: The British Library, 1986). Mellor, A. K. (ed), Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mellor, A. K., Romanticism and Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Moers, E., Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976). Mullan, J., Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 2007). Paulus Jr., M. J., ‘Reconceptualising Academic Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 11:4 (2011), pp. 939–52. Pettit, A. (ed.), Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays on Editing Novels and Novelists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Pettit, A., ‘Terrible Texts, “Marginal” Works, and the Mandate of the Moment: The Case of Eliza Haywood’, TSWL, 22:2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 293–314. Pettit, A., ‘The Pickering & Chatto Female Spectator: Nearly Four Pounds of Ephemera, Enshrined’, in D. J. Newman and L. M. Wright (eds), Fair

Selected works cited  195 Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and ‘The Female Spectator’ (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 42–59. Pierazzo, E., Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Pohl, N. and B. A. Schellenberg (eds), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2003). Price, F., Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Ricoeur, P., Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Ross, M. B., The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Ross, S. C. E. and P. Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Sandock, M., ‘Mothers of the Novel: Rediscovering Early Women Writers’, Cresset, 54:5 (1991), pp. 10–14. Schreibman, S., R. Siemens and J. Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Showalter, E., A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Small, I. and M. Walsh (eds), The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Smith, D. I. B. (ed.), Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968). Smith, O., Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Spencer, J., The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Stevens, L., ‘Telling Tales of Virago Press’, in S. Brown (ed.), Consuming Books: The Marketing and Consumption of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 160–6. Swan, Jesse G. (ed.), Editing Lives: Essays in Contemporary Textual and Biographical Studies in Honor of O M Brack, Jr. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014). Tanselle, T. G., ‘Some Principles for Editorial Apparatus’, Studies in Bibliography, 25 (1972), pp. 41–88. Thompson, L. M., The ‘Scandalous Memoirists’: Constantia Phillips, Laetitia Pilkington and the Shame of ‘Publick Fame’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Todd, J., Dictionary of British Women Writers (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Todd, J., The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Todd, J., ‘“Pursue that way of fooling, and be damn’d”: Editing Aphra Behn’, Studies in the Novel, Special Issue: Editing Novels and Novelists, Now, 27:3 (1995), pp. 304–19. Turner, C., Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

196  Selected works cited Van Alphen, E., Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Vanhoutte, E., ‘Where is the Editor? Resistance in the Creation of an Electronic Critical Edition’, Human IT, 3:1 (1999), pp. 197–214. Vanhoutte, E. and R. Van den Branden, ‘Describing, Transcribing, Encoding, and Editing Modern Correspondence Material: A Textbase Approach’, Lit Linguist Computing, 24:1 (2009), pp. 77–98. Voss, P. J. and M. L. Werner, ‘Towards a Poetics of the Archive: Introduction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 32:1 (Spring 1999), pp. i–vii. Walker, G. Luria (ed.), The Invention of Female Biography (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2017). Walsh, M., Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Wilson, C. Shiner and J. Haefner (eds), Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Wolfson, S. J., Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Woolf, V., A Room of One’s Own (London: Granada Publishing, 1979).

Index

annotation see also footnote; creation of 32–3, 144–5; effect of 34, 60–61, 66–72; function of 9–10, 21, 23–6, 130–32; intertextuality and 10, 76–93 anonymity 13, 97, 111–21, 124–5, 129–31, 133, 141–2; use of eidolon 34–5, 111 archive, digital archives 6, 13–14, 19, 172–87; editorial theory and 6, 8, 12–13, 51–6, 61–6; multiple archives 156–69; selection from 12, 139, 149–51 Austen, Jane 2, 3, 4, 21, 22, 23, 43, 45, 46, 87, 117 attribution 13, 70–72, 111–21, 126–31 Baillie, Joanna 83, 92 Barbauld, Anna 46, 47, 50, 55, 66, 85, 174, 179, 184 Barrett, Charlotte 156, 157, 167, 169 Behn, Aphra 2, 3, 12, 144 Benstock, Shari 25, 132 biography, of authors 34–5, 50, 67, 78, 81, 157, 162–3, 178–9, 184; relationship to editing 9, 11–12, 115, 119, 121, 139–53 Bluestockings 10, 77, 92, 112, 160, 174, 175, 178, 179, 183–4 Blunt, Reginald 172, 184 Boscawen, Frances 151, 174 Bowers, Fredson 6, 52, 64–5 Bree, Linda 112–13 Brewer, William 44 Brooke, Frances 3, 40 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57 Burke, Edmund 77–80 Burney, Charles, Jr. 159 Burney, Frances 2, 11, 12, 21, 24, 117, 156–69, 174

Burney, Sarah Harriet 10, 18, 21–6, 165, 167 Bury, Charlotte 124–5, 129–35 Butler, Marilyn 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 145 Bysshe, Edward 33 Cambridge, George Owen 161, 162 Cameron, Jeannie 103 canon, editing non-canonical authors 7–8, 51–7, 60–8, 126, 134–5, 145, 179–80; expansion of 1–6, 9–11, 14–15, 18–20, 32, 116, 168, 180; women writers’ place in 10, 13, 39, 43–50, 144–9 Carter, Elizabeth 92, 111, 112, 116, 151, 174, 183–4 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen 125, 127–9, 132–4 Cary, Catherine 124–9, 134–5 Chawton House Library Series 3, 4, 10, 13, 18–26, 76, 112, 124, 139–53 chivalry 97–100, 104, 107 Cleland, John 120 Climenson, Emily 172, 175, 184 Colburn, Henry 23, 101, 129, 133, 134 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 45, 47, 57 Collins, Wilkie 10, 23 Compston, H. F. B. 115–16 copy-text 32, 37–8, 63–5 The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée 140, 145–6 correspondence see letters Curran, Stuart 5–6, 49, 50 Dacre, Charlotte 99 d’Arblay, Alexander 158, 159, 165, 166 d’Arblay, Alexandre 158, 159, 163, 164, 165

198 Index d’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine 69 Davenport, Hester 53, 55 Defoe, Daniel 61, 64–7, 118 Delany, Mary 161 de Maisonneuve, Marie 164, 168 Derrida, Jacques 175, 176, 177, 180 diaries 11, 124–6, 129–35, 140, 142–3, 156–69, 178, 181 Dickens, Charles 22, 23 digitization of books 1, 4–8, 13–14, 19, 21, 64–5, 172–87 Dodsley, James 112 Dodsley, Robert 24, 112 Doody, Margaret Anne 7, 11, 146 Doran, John 184 Dunton, John 35 Edgeworth, Maria 3, 9, 12, 115 editing, and archives 11–13, 51–6, 156–69, 174–87; and author attribution 70–72, 111–21, 125–31; relationship to criticism 9–12, 30–40, 45–50, 57, 66–70, 72, 84, 130, 135, 145–8, 185; digital editing 5–7, 13–14, 172–87; history of 1–5, 18–20, 178–9; successive editions 12, 56–7, 66–7, 132–5, 141–4, 147–53, 156–69; theories of 6–8, 11–12, 61–5, 125–6; unfamiliar genres 60–1, 65–72, 96–108; value of 18–26, 29–31, 51, 139–40 editor, role of 6–15, 18–26, 125–6, 139–40; as narrative device 97, 104–5, 131–2; successive editors 11, 132–5, 141–2, 148–53, 172 (electronic) databases, creation of 13–14, 64–5, 172–87; examples of 4–6, 19; use of 32–3, 113–14 endnote see footnote epistolary fiction 22, 69–72 Ezell, Margaret 7–8, 118 fiction, amatory fiction 11, 31, 39, 130; anonymity and 111, 116–21; crime fiction 10, 23; Gothic fiction 23, 79, 99, 104, 127–8; historical fiction 10, 96–108; intertextuality in 23–5, 76–93; recovery of 2–5, 18–21, 39–40, 43–9, 140–1, 144–6; relationship to other genres 60, 66–9; revised critical understandings of 9–10, 21–6,

71–2, 96–108, 130, 135; roman à clef 98–125, 130–1, 134; romance 60, 96–108, 140; silver fork fiction 129–30, 135 Fielding, Henry 36, 40 Fielding, Sarah 4, 112–14 footnote see also annotation; authorial 96, 105–6, 131–4; editorial 12, 25–6, 60–1, 66–71, 105–6, 144–5 Forster, Charles 166 Foucault, Michel 116, 176 Furbank, P. N. 65–6 Galt, John 133–4 Garside, Peter 84, 86, 87, 97 Genlis, Stéphanie-Félicité de 99 genre, instability of 60–1, 66–70, 72, 125; rethinking of 9–11, 22–3, 33–5, 38–40, 96–108, 135 Gibbes, Phebe 116–18 Gildon, Charles 64 Godwin, William 178, 179 Goldsmith, Oliver 36, 40, 146 Granville, George 69 Gray, Thomas 77, 78, 81–4, 86, 87, 91 Green, Sarah 10, 96–100, 103–8 Greg, W. W. 6–7, 52, 62, 64, 65 Grundy, Isobel 3, 5, 7, 9–10, 25, 133, 134 Hays, Mary 3, 8, 45 Haywood, Eliza 2, 4, 9, 12, 29–40, 61, 63–4 Hemans, Felicia 46, 48 Hemlow, Joyce 157–66, 168 Herman, Ruth 9, 63, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 Home, John 76, 87–92 Huntington, Henry E. 184 Huxley, Aldous 43–8 Imlay, Gilbert 178 Jenkinson, Hilary 177 Johnson, Joseph 118 Johnson, Samuel 24–5, 36, 40, 148, 150, 160, 161, 162, 166, 178 journals see diaries Kippis, Andrew 92 Köster, Patricia 67, 68, 70–1 Kristeva, Julia 76

Index  199 Labbe, Jacqueline 57, 81 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 46, 57 Lane, William 56–7 Larrey, Dominique-Jean 164 LeFanu, Alicia 11, 140–8, 150 Lennox, Charlotte 40 letters, editing of 14, 143, 149–52, 156–69, 172–87; fictional status of 35, 68–70 Lockhart, John Gibson 150–1 Manley, Delarivier 4, 9, 12–13, 60–72, 130 McGann, Jerome J. 7–8, 49, 62, 64, 65, 125, 134 Mellor, Anne K. 49–50, 57 memoirs 10–11, 12, 13; definition of 142–3; editing 124–35, 139–53; by authors 53, 57, 159, 169 Millar, John 97–8, 104 Milton, John 46, 49–51, 57, 76, 78 Montagu, Barbara 112, 113, 120 Montagu, Elizabeth 6, 13, 77–9, 92, 112, 113, 116, 160, 172–87 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 5, 9–10, 12 Montagu, Matthew 183 Moore, Thomas 133, 143 More, Hannah 11, 12, 45, 47, 141–4, 148–53, 174 Mounsey, Chris 70 new bibliography 6–8 Owens, W. R. 61, 64–6 Pandora Press 2, 3, 18 Pascoe, Judith 56, 106 periodical, contributions to 9, 20, 35, 36, 40, 65–6, 67, 116, 140; editing of 29–40; reviews in 126, 142; versions of 39 Pettit, Alexander 6, 29, 30–1, 32, 36–8, 39, 60, 61–4 Pickersgill, Joshua 99 Pickering & Chatto 3–4, 6, 14, 18, 29–30, 31–2, 36, 38, 44, 88, 112, 141, 144, 145 Piozzi, Gabriel 161 Piozzi, Hester Thrale 159, 160, 161, 163, 174, 178 poetry, editing of 43–57; inclusion in works of 24, 32–3, 77–8, 80–4

Pope, Alexander 36, 46, 51, 66, 78, 86 Porter, Jane 10, 96, 98, 100–8 Powell, Manushag 35, 37, 38, 39 Pratt, Samuel Jackson 52, 53 pseudonymity 13, 116, 118, 124, 125, 126–7, 135 Raven, James 119 Reeve, Clara 4, 32, 38, 98–100, 107 Reynolds, Joshua 89 Richardson, Samuel 36, 111–13, 118, 120, 179 Ricoeur, Paul 180 Rivington, John 112 Rizzo, Betty 113, 160 Roberts, William 11, 12, 141, 142–4, 148–52 Robertson, William 104 Robinson, Maria Elizabeth 52, 53 Robinson, Mary 12, 43–57, 105–7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 76, 77, 84–8, 92 satire 22, 60, 61, 66, 70, 71, 100, 107, 108, 131 Scott, Sarah 2, 113, 174, 185 Scott, Walter 66, 96–7, 98, 100, 101, 102, 108, 133, 150 Seward, Anna 46, 108 Shakespeare, William 22, 24, 78–9, 87, 90 Sheridan, Frances 2–3, 4, 11, 141–8 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 143, 147, 150, 160 Showalter, Elaine 48, 49 Siddons, Sarah 88–90, 92 Smart, Christopher 40 Smith, Charlotte 3, 6, 45, 46, 47, 50, 92, 98, 115, 146 Smith, Nicholas D. 149, 151 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 29 Spedding, Patrick 30, 37, 38, 63 Spencer, Jane 2 Spencer, William Robert 24 Spender, Dale 2, 20 Steuart, A. Francis 133–4 Sutherland, Kathryn 8, 133 Talbot, Catherine 111, 112, 116, 183 Tanselle, Thomas G. 182 Tarleton, Banastre 107 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 180 Thomson, Katherine 146

200 Index Thornton, Bonnell 40 Thornton, Marianne 149 Thrale, Hester Lynch, later Piozzi see Piozzi Thrale, Hester Maria, ‘Queeney’ 162–3 Tighe, Mary 46, 49 Todd, Janet 2, 3, 12, 84, 86, 87, 144 Tollemache, Thomas 69–70 Trimmer, Sarah 11, 141–2, 144, 148 Troide, Lars E. 157, 159, 160 Vesey, Elizabeth 174, 183 Virago 2, 18 Virtue, George 101

Walpole, Horace 139–40, 151, 174 Warren, Michelle 8, 133 Watkins, John 150 Wedderburn, Alexander 92 West, Jane 98, 146 Williams, Helen Maria 10, 46–7, 76–93 Willis, Nathaniel Parker 101 Wilson, Harriette 127, 130 Wollstonecraft, Mary 3, 21, 47, 79, 98, 104, 178–9 Woolf, Virginia 43–4, 46, 49, 76 Wordsworth, William 13, 43, 45–9, 51; Cornell 52–3, 54, 56–7, 61–2