Introduction: Gender, genre and authorship

Literary scholars now recognize, as Clare Brant expresses it, that ‘many women writers in eighteenth-century Britain were not novelists, poets, or dramatists. They were writers of letters, diaries, memoirs, essays — genres of sometimes uncertain status then and certainly liminal status now’.1 This collection of new essays argues for the importance of women’s life writing, both within women’s literary history and as an integral part of the culture and practice of eighteenth-century and Romantic auto/biography. As these essays show, research in this area has broader implications for our understanding of literary genres, constructions of gender, the relationship between manuscript and print culture, the mechanisms of publicity and celebrity, and models of authorship in the period.