*/
Welcome to Hidden Histories, the New Statesman’s history podcast, hosted by deputy editor Helen Lewis. Each series explores a subject that the textbooks hid, held-back, or hijacked, starting with “The Great Forgetting: Women Writers Before Austen”.
Most eighteenth century novels were written by women. So why are the authors we remember mostly men? Here, you can find out how our episodes will confront this question, explore links to further reading and learn more about the show’s guests.
You can also listen to the trailer using the player below…
… or subscribe in iTunes.
Series Breakdown
1. Re-writing the rise of the novel: who do conventional accounts of the era overlook?
2. Bluestocking culture: how did women become writers?
3. Sociable spaces: what did it mean to have a magazine by women?
4. Unsex’d females: women writers and radical politics
5. Fight club: who’s the most interesting female writer of the Eighteenth century?
6. The Great Forgetting: why are the authors we remember mostly men?
About our Guests
Dr Sophie Coulombeau is a lecturer at Cardiff University, novelist, and BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. She blogs at Sophie Coulombeau and tweets @SMCoulombeau . Her favourite female writer of the period is Frances Burney .
Dr Elizabeth Edwards is a research fellow on the “Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour” project, at the University of Wales. She specialises in the history of women’s writing, tweets @eliz_edw and flies the flag for Hester Thrale Piozzi.
Dr Jennie Batchelor is a Reader in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent and Principal Investigator on “The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre”. She tweets @jenniebatchelor and her favourite writer of the series is ‘Anonymous’.
Series Reading list
Episode 1: Rewriting the Rise of the Novel
Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Wiley Blackwell, 1986)
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (Pandora, 1986)
Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (Virago, 1989)
Episode 2: Bluestocking culture
Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago University Press, 2000)
Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (Pimlico, 2004)
Devoney Looser, ‘Catherine Macaulay: The “Female Historian” in Context’, Études Épistémè17 (2010)
Episode 3: Sociable spaces
Jennie Batchelor, Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi, ‘The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’
Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women’s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (Allen and Unwin, 1972)
Mary Thale, ‘Women in London Debating Societies in 1780’, Gender & History, 7:1 (April 1995), pp. 5-24
London Debates: 1780
Episode 4: The Unsex’d Females
Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Indiana University Press, 2002)
Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Episode 5: Fight Club
Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life In The Works (Rutgers University Press, 1988)
Frances Burney, Evelina (World’s Classics, 2008)
William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (University of North Carolina Press, 1985)
John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Faber, 2008)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (World’s Classics, 2015)
Episode 6: The Great Forgetting
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
William McCarthy, ‘The Repression of Hester Lynch Piozzi: or, How we forgot a revolution in authorship’, MLA 18:1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 99-111.
Content from our partners
Related
