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.