Women's Literary Education, C. 1690-1850

The essays in this volume reveal the complex, various, sometimes contradictory, and often significant ways in which female literary authors interrogated and advanced educational philosophy and practice during the long eighteenth century, reaching back to the last decade of the seventeenth century and forward into the first half of the nineteenth century. The collection draws out how long-eighteenth-century discourses of education shaped what it meant for women to write and how women writers shaped long-eighteenth-century discourses of education, spotlighting the influence of female authors on eighteenth-century debates about education as they are conducted in and through literary form. By identifying a discernible tradition of women's educational literature, and, in doing so, restoring female writers to the centre of the stage, this book adds its voice to existing scholarly efforts to correct the ongoing critical tendency to marginalise the contribution of women to the history of educational thought.

Louise Joy is a Fellow, Director of Studies and College Associate Professor in English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, where she is the Vice-Principal. She is the author of Eighteenth-Century Literary Affections (Palgrave, 2020), Literature's Children: The Critical Child and the Art of Idealisation (Bloomsbury, 2019), the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry: A Study of Children's Verse in English (Routledge, 2018) and Poetry and Childhood (Trentham Press, 2010).

Jessica Lim supervises English Literature at the University of Cambridge and has previously been a Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish College. Her research focuses on women's writing and children's literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she is particularly interested in literary explorations of theological and pedagogical concerns. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Notes and Queries, and Oxford Research in English.