Volume four of the Series 'The History of British Women's Writing' charts the most significant changes for a literary history of women in a period that saw the beginnings of a discourse of 'enlightened feminism'. It reveals that women engaged in forms old and new, seeking to shape and transform the culture of letters rather than simply reflect or respond to the work of their male contemporaries.
The period in Volume V of the Series ‘The History of British Women's Writing’ witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. Building on the success and popularity of earlier poets, novelists, playwrights, and philosophers, British women consolidated their significance as writers in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. They participated in movements like Bluestocking intellectualism, abolition, new understandings of class, religion, and childhood. They initiated literary styles like the novel of sensibility, the elegiac sonnet, and the historical romance. A.o. Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Tighe, and Joanna Baillie.