1986 feminist literary study
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen Author Dale Spender Cover artist Marion Dalley Language English Subject Feminist literary history Publisher Pandora Press , London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New YorkPublication date
1986 Media type print Pages 357 ISBN 0863580815 9780863580819OCLC 1036783258 823/.009/9287 LC Class PR113 .S63 1986
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender , is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Mothers of the Novel
Part I
Mothers of the Novel is divided into three parts. Part I treats a series of seventeenth-century women writers, only some of whom would have been familiar to most readers in 1986: Aphra Behn (1640–1689), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Anne Clifford (1590–1676), Anne Fanshawe (1625–1680), Eliza Haywood (1693–1756),[1] Lucy Hutchinson (1618–1681), Delarivière Manley (1663 –1724), Katherine Philips (1631–1664), Anna Weamys (fl. 1651), and Mary Wroth (1587– 1653).
Part II
Part II includes a list of one hundred and six (106) early women novelists little-known at the time of writing, and the titles of 568 of their novels. Many of these works have since been reprinted and become subjects of academic study, though a proportion of these writers remain relatively obscure or, in some cases, unidentified.
Part III
Part III treats a series of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers from the list: Mary Brunton , Frances Burney , Maria Edgeworth , Sarah Fielding , Mary Hays , Elizabeth Inchbald , Charlotte Lennox , Amelia Opie , Sydney Owenson , Ann Radcliffe , Charlotte Smith , and Mary Wollstonecraft .
Mothers of the Novel series
Pandora Press released a companion "Mothers of the Novel" series of twenty novels by sixteen authors between 1986 and 1989:
Mary Brunton , Discipline (1815; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-105-6
Mary Brunton , Self-control (1810/11; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-084-X
Frances Burney , The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties (1814; repr. 1988) ISBN 0-86358-263-X
Maria Edgeworth , Belinda (1801; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-074-2
Maria Edgeworth , Helen (1834; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-104-8
Maria Edgeworth , Patronage (1814; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-106-4
Eliza Fenwick , Secrecy, or The Ruin of the Rock (1795; repr. 1988) ISBN 0-86358-307-5
Sarah Fielding , The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-182-X
Mary Hamilton , Munster Village (1778; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-133-1
Mary Hays , Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-132-3
Eliza Haywood , The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-090-4
Elizabeth Inchbald , A Simple Story (1791; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-136-6
Harriet Lee and Sophia Lee , The Canterbury Tales (1797–1805; repr. 1989) ISBN 0-86358-308-3
Charlotte Lennox , The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella (1752; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-080-7
Sydney Owenson , The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys: A National Tale (1827; repr. 1988) ISBN 0-86358-289-3
Sydney Owenson , The Wild Irish Girl (1806; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-097-1
Amelia Opie , Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter (1804; repr. 1986) ISBN 0-86358-085-8
Frances Sheridan , Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-134-X
Charlotte Smith , Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle (1788; repr. 1989) ISBN 0-86358-264-8
Charlotte Smith , The Old Manor House (1793; repr. 1987) ISBN 0-86358-135-8