Colette Davies was awarded her PhD by the University of Nottingham in 2022 for her thesis, ‘Women Writers, Authorship, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel: Representations of the Female Author in the Minerva Press (1785–1800). Between 2018 and2022 she was one of the Postgraduate Representatives for the British Association for Romantic Studies and co-organised the 2020 ‘Romantic Futurities’ BARS Early Career and Postgraduate Conference. She was a co-contributor for the ‘Romantic Novel’ section of the Year’s Work in English Studies (2020–2021) and has co-edited a special edition and written an article for Romanticism on the Net (2021). She is now a Knowledge Exchange and Impact Manager at the University of Nottingham, and enjoys working with academics and external partners to develop and realise external engagement with and the impacts of research.
In the late eighteenth century, the literary marketplace expanded significantly and review culture burgeoned. Mary Wollstonecraft, often perceived as an avant-garde feminist, embarked on a ‘new plan of life’ as a paid, professional reviewer for Joseph Johnson’s and Thomas Christie’s Analytical Review. This article uses Wollstonecraft’s reviews to analyse Wollstonecraft’s reviewer persona and seeks to reveal the value in studying the language of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, illuminating the richness of her language as she negotiates fashioning herself as an authoritative figure while providing, often strongly held and strongly articulated, literary and wider sociopolitical criticism. She employs specific tropes, such as that of parenthood rather than motherhood, and methods, often comparing writers against one another in her reviews, to challenge expectations of women, of writing and of culture and to convey her own standards. However, it is these standards which reveal Wollstonecraft to opine views with classist and hierarchical echoes in reviews of established, popular and neophyte writers alike. Thus, by different means, hierarchies of literary ability come to the fore in Wollstonecraft’s reviews and, as the reviewer but also a writer, Wollstonecraft ensures she stands supreme. Yet, as this essay concludes, she does so in her endeavour to guide readers in whose hands rested future literary, sociopolitical and cultural values. Continue reading →
In anticipation of our forthcoming special issue on ‘The Minerva Press and the Literary Marketplace’, this post is the first in a series by Colette Davies reflecting on the role played by the firm during the Romantic era and its somewhat tarnished reputation in the following centuries—a challenge that the essays in our new issue seek to address. Continue reading →
Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism: ‘A Tribe of Authoresses’ is the first book to appear in a new series, ‘Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850’, edited by Tim Fulford and Alan Vardy. This … Continue reading →
