ABSTRACT
A collection of essays focused on editing women writers might suggest that there is something intrinsically different about editing a female, rather than a male, writer. There is certainly a difference between editing Manley's works and the works of a male Romantic poet such as William Wordsworth, but the difference between Wordsworth and Manley is not merely a matter of gender, but also a matter of canonical status and availability of manuscripts. Because Manley's scholarship was at such an early stage when the authors began their edition, the central task of editing these works was annotating her many references to court and society figures and helping readers understand the genres in which she was working, genres that have often been misunderstood by modern readers. Manley's first published work, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley, provides an ideal example of the difficulty we face in understanding the genres Manley was working in.
