ABSTRACT
As Radway aptly notes in her 1987 introduction to the British edition of Reading the Romance, ‘whatever her intentions, no writer can foresee or prescribe the way her book will develop, be taken up, or read’ (Radway 1984b (1987): 2). That introduction, in which Radway attempts to explain both the specific context in which her own work developed, and attempts to ‘secure a particular reading’ (1) for it in the context of its British publication is, to my mind, exemplary, not least for the clarity with which she both addresses what she subsequently perceived as the limitations of that work, and the way in which she forcefully recounts her own sense of the continuing importance of the questions which it was attempting to answer.
