ABSTRACT
The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English explicitly dedicates only nine of its near 600 pages to “women translators,” in spite of the editors’ assurance that women played active and significant roles in the history of eighteenth-century translation. This chapter argues that eighteenth-century women translators have been doubly excluded from critical discourse, largely omitted from both histories of translation and feminist efforts at “recovery.” Paula Backscheider’s methodology is a nuanced consideration of gender and how contemporary critical assumptions shape recovery efforts by feminist scholars. She asks important and necessary questions about the role of agency in canonization and recognizes that gender identity is exceedingly complex, involving “relationships and interactions with other components of identity, such as class and life experiences.” Aphra Behn acknowledges that any authorial identity is always inherently relational; it forms at the intersections of Behn’s work, the original text, and the reader’s response to that text.
