The Lost Tradition: Women Novel Writers in Einghteenth-century England

Abstract

This dissertation aims to explore the work of women novel writers in eighteenth-century England. Despite the popularity which characterised women’s literary production at the time –especially among female readers- many of these authors often lack the critical recognition enjoyed by male eighteenth-century writers, such as Daniel Defoe or Samuel Richardson, thus constituting a “lost tradition” fallen into oblivion. However, these women’s contribution to the development and consolidation of the novel form –both in terms of discursive strategies, themes, motifs and ideas –is central to the genre and deserves to be validated by contemporary critical standards. To pursue this aim, this dissertation will examine novels by writers such as Frances Burney and will focus on central notions which prefigure the work of these writers in terms of narrative form and ideology. This dissertation will thus be informed by the critical work of seminal authors who have delved into these women’s narrative strategies and explored major considerations which have contributed to give pre-eminence to their male counterparts, such as Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan’s British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (2005) or María Jesús Lorenzo Modia’s Literatura femenina inglesa del siglo XVIII, among others.