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.
Author | Dale Spender |
---|---|
Cover artist | Marion Dalley |
Language | English |
Subject | Feminist literary history |
Publisher | Pandora Press, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York |
Publication date | 1986 |
Media type | |
Pages | 357 |
ISBN | 0863580815 9780863580819 |
OCLC | 1036783258 |
823/.009/9287 | |
LC Class | PR113 .S63 1986 |
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 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 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.
Pandora Press released a companion "Mothers of the Novel" series of twenty novels by sixteen authors between 1986 and 1989: