This publication highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, it examines how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, it deals with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth is analysed how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country's borders.
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.