• Introduction: locating Elizabeth Singer Rowe
• Positioning Rowe's fiction
• Isles of happiness
• Toward novelistic discourse
• The beautiful life
• Conclusion: lifestyle as legacy.

"Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel" is the first in-depth study of Rowe's prose fiction. A four-volume collection of her work was a bestseller for a hundred years after its publication, but today Rowe is a largely unrecognized figure in the history of the novel. Although her poetry was appreciated by poets such as Alexander Pope for its metrical craftsmanship, beauty, and imagery, by the time of her death in 1737 she was better known for her fiction. According to Paula R. Backscheider, Rowe's major focus in her novels was on creating characters who were seeking a harmonious, contented life, often in the face of considerable social pressure. This quest would become the plotline in a large number of works in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it continues to be a major theme today in novels by women. Backscheider relates Rowe's work to popular fiction written by earlier writers as well as by her contemporaries. Rowe had a lasting influence on major movements, including the politeness (or gentility) movement, the reading revolution, and the Bluestocking society. The author reveals new information about each of these movements, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe emerges as an important innovator. Her influence resulted in new types of novel writing, philosophies, and lifestyles for women. Backscheider looks to archival materials, literary analysis, biographical evidence, and a configuration of cultural and feminist theories to prove her groundbreaking argument.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"Those of us who joined together to produce this book represent over seventy-five years of feminist scholarship. We have seen and participated in one of the most important changes in the history of literary study ...There is a special joy in writing essays like these--essays that bring an entire career's worth of learning and thinking to bear on women, literature, and society."--from the Preface, by Paula R. Backscheider Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel and demonstrates the reactivation of texts, a kind of criticism that produces rich contextualization in order to reveal the story beneath--not only of the individual writer but also of a text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. The essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and works and between everyday existence and political processes. The essays bring together a number of things often discussed separately or even opposed to one another. Among these are attention to the constructing power of sociohistorical forces and the individual creating writer and the works of male and female authors. The essays span more that 100 years, beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A wife to be lett: a comedy (1724)
• The city jilt; or, The alderman turn'd beau: a secret history (1726)
• The mercenary lover; or, The unfortunate heiresses (1726)
• From The fruitless enquiry (1727)
• The opera of operas; or, Tom Thumb the Great (1733)
• From The adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736)
• From The invisible spy (1755)
• From The wife (1756).

Although Eliza Haywood was one of the best known and most prolific writers in her own time, there is no modern edition of her works. This edition provides representative texts from Haywood's entire career, which overlaps that of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. The six fictions and two plays provided here illustrate the many kinds of writing Haywood produced, the ways she treated important themes and issues, and the contributions she made to the development of the English novel.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Novel's gendered space ; Rise of gender as political category / Paula R. Backscheider
• Renegotiating the gothic / Betty Rizzo
• My art belongs to daddy? : Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the pre-texts of Belinda : women writers and patriarchal authority / Mitzi Myers
• Jane Austen and the culture of circulating libraries : the construction of female literacy / Barbara M. Benedict.

"Those of us who joined together to produce this book represent over seventy-five years of feminist scholarship. We have seen and participated in one of the most important changes in the history of literary study ...There is a special joy in writing essays like these--essays that bring an entire career's worth of learning and thinking to bear on women, literature, and society."--from the Preface, by Paula R. Backscheider Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel and demonstrates the reactivation of texts, a kind of criticism that produces rich contextualization in order to reveal the story beneath--not only of the individual writer but also of a text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. The essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and works and between everyday existence and political processes. The essays bring together a number of things often discussed separately or even opposed to one another. Among these are attention to the constructing power of sociohistorical forces and the individual creating writer and the works of male and female authors. The essays span more that 100 years, beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)