Pleas for Respectability: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Theorizing the Novel

The emergence and development of the modern novel used to be viewed as a largely masculine affair. However, over the past few decades, researchers and scholars have started to re-evaluate and acknowledge the importance of women’s literary and theoretical work to the rise and evolution of the genre. This article adds to these revisionist efforts by contributing to the ongoing discussion on the theoretical legacy left by some of the most notable British women writers of the long eighteenth century. The article analyses several texts (prefaces, dedications, dialogues, essays, reviews) in which they expressed their perspectives on questions situated at the core of the eighteenth-century debates concerning the novel. The critical and theoretical perspectives advanced by these writers are approached as contributions to the novel’s status as a respectable literary genre and, implicitly, as self-legitimizing efforts.