Her biographer Joanne Magnani Sperle
notes that JL
's year of birth is open to debate (most biographers, and commentator Paula McDowell
, list it...
Family and Intimate relationships
Delarivier Manley
A baby boy who was born in summer and died in December 1694 at Truro in Cornwall, who was registered as the child of John Manley and his first or legitimate wife, may have been...
Literary responses
Elinor James
Literary historian Paula McDowell
thinks EJ
's work was taken seriously by close observers of the London political scene.
Material Conditions of Writing
Elinor James
The count of ninety of EJ
's writings surviving has been raised from a previous but still recent estimate of about fifty known. The English Short Title Catalogue lists twenty titles beginning with the words...
Occupation
Marie-Catherine d' Aulnoy
Literary historian Paula McDowell
believes that MCA
worked as a spy for the French government (as Aphra Behn
did for the English).
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
263-4 and n88
Occupation
Elinor James
Literary historian Paula McDowell
points out that although traditional histories of the book trade reckon that EJ
became a printer and publisher only when she became a widow, she was in fact in the business...
Author summary
Elinor James
EJ
was a publisher and political writer in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as well as a tireless admonisher of monarchs and fervent supporter of the Church of England
. Her tone has...
Author summary
Delarivier Manley
DM
was a pioneer in many fields: poetry, drama, journalism, and fiction, and the genres with which the fiction of her period interlocked: letters, soft pornography, satire, secret history, romance autobiography, and political polemic...
DM
writes of herself as an expert in love, despite what she describes as her unalluring appearance. She presents herself, however, through men's eyes and as a topic of male gossip (in contrast with the...
Textual Features
Joan Whitrow
She reminds the professors of religion that your poor Neighbours, many hundreds in City and Country, sits in their Houses with empty Bellies, both of Weavers and others, that knows not which way to shift...
Textual Features
Anne Docwra
Scholar Paula McDowell
notes that the outrageous rudeness . . . . taunting jests, breathless rant, and verbal jousting
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
147
were selling points in a literary marketplace where religious opinion was a hot commodity—and that...
Textual Features
Jane Lead
Here JL
urges her readers: Dive into your own Celestiality, and see with what manner of spirits you are endued: for in them the powers do entirely lie for Transformation.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
177
Critic Paula McDowell
insists...
Textual Features
Delarivier Manley
The text belongs to a genre well-known in France as the chronique scandaleuse, and popularised in England through the writings of Madame d'Aulnoy
(who had been much translated, and had already influenced DM
). It...
Textual Features
Delarivier Manley
Critic Paula McDowell
notes how, in addition to conventional images of authorship as giving birth, the New Atalantis makes extraordinary use of the topos of childbirth, featuring shady midwives and abandoned bastards, and graphically depicted...
Timeline
1720-9
Only about 1.1 percent of English annual print production was composed of fiction (both new and reprinted).
By 1770
The proportion of fiction among annual publications in England had risen to four percent (from 1.1% in about 1730).
James, Elinor. “Introductory Note”. Elinor James, edited by Paula McDowell, Ashgate, 2005, p. v - xxviii.
McDowell, Paula. “Narrative Authority, Critical Complicity: The Case of <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Jonathan Wild</span>”;. Studies in the Novel, Vol.
30
, No. 2, pp. 211-31.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
McDowell, Paula. “Women and the business of print”. Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, edited by Vivien Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 135-54.