Women and Gender

Since the 1980s, study of women writers and gender issues in the British Romantic era has transformed the canon and revolutionized scholarship in the field. See the Jackson bibliography under Aids to Research; the Anthologies under Primary Works; the electronic editions available through the website Romantic-Era Women Writers; and the anthologies edited by Wilson and Haefer and Feldman and Kelly. Homans, Alexander, Ross, and Mellor (1988, 1992) got the ball rolling and remain valuable. For more recent studies, see Faye, Wordsworth, and the anthologies, especially Linkin and Behrendt (1999). Read the introductions to these books and seek reviews to get a sense of the current scholarship in the field. As they have reshaped the canon by their methodology and stance, these works should also be read as contributions to the theory of Romanticism (go to Theories of Romanticism under Literary-Critical Studies). They also overlap with works under Empire & Slavery.

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Alexander, Meena. Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989)

Armstrong, Isobel. "The Gush of the Feminine: How Can We Read Women's Poetry of the Romantic Period?", in Feldman and Kelley

Behrendt, Stephen and Harriet Kramer Linkin, eds. Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period (1997)

Copeland, Edward. Women Writing About Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (1995)

Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993 )

Ellison, Julie. Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (1990)

Fass, Barbara. La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (1974)

Fay, Elizabeth. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (1998)

Feldman, Paula R. and Theresa M. Kelley, eds. Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (1995)

Ferguson, Moira. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender (1995)

Ferguson, Moira, Colonialism and Gender From Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid (1994)

Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (1992)

Fulford, Tim. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt (1999)

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979)

Gutwirth, Madelyn. Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (1992)

Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (1986)

Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity (1980)

Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995)

Keane, Angela. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (2001)

Kelly, Gary. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827 (1993)

Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (1990)

Levin, Susan. Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (1987)

Linkin, Harriet Kramer, and Stephen C. Behrendt, eds. Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Door of Reception (1999)

Mandell, Laura. "Misogyny and the Canon: The Character of Women in Anthologies of Poetry," in Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999)

Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender (1992)

Mellor, Anne K., ed. Romanticism and Feminism (1988)

Myers, Sylvia. The Bluestocking Circle : Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (1990)

Page, Judith W. Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (1994)

Ross, Marlon B. The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (1989)

Todd, Janet, ed . A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800 (1987)

Todd, Janet. Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (1989)

Ty, Eleanor Rose. Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (1993)

Wilson, Carol S. and Joel Haefer, eds. Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837 (1994)

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (1992)

Wordsworth, Jonathan. The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age (1997)
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