Journal Article

A New Republic of Women’s Letters

LEVY, MICHELLE

2020

Overview

2 It does so not by addressing McGann’s substantial body of work on individual women writers—on Felicia Hemans, L. E. L., Mary Robinson, Ann Batten Cristall, and Christina Rossetti—but rather by extending McGann’s powerful insights into a consideration of how we as scholars can participate in the material transformation of the archive, in this case, the archive of women’s writing. Calling for a full implementation of McGann’s understanding that textual criticism and bibliography are “conceptually fundamental rather than preliminary to the study of literature,”3 this article seeks to establish that scholarly attention to female literary production, transmission, and preservation is imperative for the study of women’s literature. According to Assmann, active cultural forgetting “is implied in intentional acts such as trashing and destroying,” whereas the passive form “is related to non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, dispersing, neglecting, abandoning, or leaving something behind.” Using a simple metric to determine a set of female writers equivalent to the ‘big six’—by counting the number of pages they are allotted in leading anthologies—we find that the top six female writers are, in order, Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Joanna Baillie.14 What of their literary manuscripts are extant?

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Anthologies / Archives & records / Austen, Jane (1775-1817) / Bibliographic literature / British & Irish literature / Cultural heritage / English literature / Females / Feminism / Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793-1835) / Letters / Literary criticism / McGann, Jerome J / Memory / Romantic period / Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894) / Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851) / Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806) / Textual criticism / Women / Womens literature / Writing