ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how scholarship acknowledges the ways in which feminist recovery work elucidates how eighteenth-century women writers were circumscribed by a variety of educational, class, religious, political, and racial boundaries. It offers new lenses through which to examine women’s eighteenth-century writing. The book shows how feminist recovery of women’s writing has neglected to acknowledge certain kinds of discourses in which women’s writing participated. It re-examines the concept of the poet-healer in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing. The book considers the ways in which proto-feminist women writers embraced the conservative demands of their readers. It focuses on the neglected translation work of women writers in the eighteenth century in order to argue on behalf of a reconsideration of the role of originality and agency in authorship.
