Professor of English
Simon Fraser University
The Professionalization
of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge UP, 2005).
This book studies a group of women who, though they have often been dismissed
as mere conservative, didactic, and imitative novelists, were actively and
ambitiously engaged in a range of innovative publications at the height of
the eighteenth century. Individual chapters examine key episodes or patterns
in the careers of Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, Charlotte
Lennox and Sarah Fielding, Edward Kimber and the Minifie sisters, and the
early Frances Burney. Using personal correspondence, records of contemporary
reception, research into contemporary print culture, and sociological models
of professionalization, I demonstrate that these women were active and accepted
participants in the literary and even political public spheres of the day.
I conclude with a speculative examination of their gradual disappearance from
literary history with the turn of the century.
Reconsidering the Bluestockings. A special number of The
Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2003), also published as a separate book
and now reprinted by University of California Press (2005). Co-edited with
Nicole Pohl.
This is a collection of ten original essays, with an account
of the Montague Collection at the Huntington Library, a Bluestocking bibliography,
and brief biographical accounts of key Bluestocking women. The co-authored
introduction, entitled "A Bluestocking Historiography," examines the varying
evaluations of the Bluestockings' literary, cultural, and political significance
in their time and in subsequent historical accounts. 
Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1998. Co-edited with Paul Budra.
Thirteen original essays on the
phenomenon of narrative continuation from Homer to The Terminator. The co-authored
introduction interprets the sequel as a site where the historically particular
and interdependent conditions of creation, production, dissemination, and
response are made legible. My essay in this volume examines a number of
eighteenth-century sequels by women, suggesting links between their use
of the form and their place in the developing market for print.
The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775.
Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996.
This study brings eighteenth-century
theories of sociability and conversation to bear on novels which employ
structures and tropes of circularity to model a socially conservative ideal
of cohesion and consensus. The novels examined include Sarah Fielding's
David Simple (the original Adventures and Volume the Last), Samuel Richardson's
continuation of Pamela, his final novel Sir Charles Grandison, Henry Fielding's
Amelia, Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, and Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker.
