ABSTRACT
This article examines how late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers used the apology form of the preface in order to carve a place for themselves in the literary market. This above statement of purpose introduces a series of key terms that we will be interrogating but also leaves a lot of questions. As opposed to apologizing here, as my topic would deem appropriate, for the lack and limitations of this presentation in not looking at the other strategies women might use or the larger issue of the preface as a rhetorical situation or the nature of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace generally, I want to instead focus our.attention on the topics at hand: the genre of the preface, the rhetoric of the apology, and the presentation of the woman writer.
