Correspondence of Lady Eleanor Butler and Caroline Hamilton.

The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of “retirement” turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes “proof” of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life—written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday—to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

Elizabeth Smith, a learned British woman born in the momentous year 1776, gained transnational fame posthumously for her extensive intellectual accomplishments, which encompassed astronomy, botany, history, poetry, and language studies. As she navigated her place in the world, Smith made a self-conscious decision to keep her many talents hidden from disapproving critics. Therefore, her rise to fame began only in 1808, when her posthumous memoir appeared. In this elegantly written biography, Lucia McMahon reconstructs the places and social constellations that enabled Smith’s learning and adventures in England, Wales, and Ireland, and traces her transatlantic fame and literary afterlife across Britain and the United States. Through re-telling Elizabeth Smith’s fascinating life story and retracing her posthumous transatlantic fame, McMahon reveals a larger narrative about women’s efforts to enact learned and fulfilling lives, and the cultural reactions such aspirations inspired in the early nineteenth century. Although Smith was cast as "exceptional" by her contemporaries and modern scholars alike, McMahon argues that her scholarly achievements, travel explorations, and posthumous fame were all emblematic of the age in which she lived. Offering insights into Romanticism, picturesque tourism, celebrity culture, and women’s literary productions, McMahon asks the provocative question, "How many seemingly exceptional women must we uncover in the historical record before we are no longer surprised?"

We Are But Women sets the history of Irish women in the context of the broad sweep of Irish history, dealing even-handedly with the diverse traditions of unionism and nationalism. Through an examination of exemplar individuals and organisations, the book traces the growth of Irish awareness of such `women's issues' as emancipation, divorce and abortion. Above all, it acknowledges the key role played by women in finding a solution to the Irish Question.

“A lively survey…her research and insights make us conscious of how we, today, use books.”—John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. In this fascinating and vivid history, Abigail Williams explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the eighteenth century, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, Williams offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life. “Williams’s charming pageant of anecdotes…conjures a world strikingly different from our own but surprisingly similar in many ways, a time when reading was on the rise and whole worlds sprang up around it.”—TheWashington Post

Mary Tighe's unpublished novel Selena is one of the great unknown treasures of British Romanticism. Completed in 1803, this brilliant, compulsively readable, beautifully written, and psychologically astute courtship novel is finally available in a scholarly edition that reveals Mary Tighe to have been as talented a fiction writer as she was a poet. The history of this amazing work's long journey from manuscript to print is only one of the stories Harriet Kramer Linkin recounts in this scrupulously annotated edition based on the only known copy of the manuscript, currently part of the National Library of Ireland's holdings. Linkin's introduction situates the novel in its historical context, draws attention to significant aspects of the plots and characters, and makes a strong case for Selena's importance for understanding the history of the novel, fiction by women, Anglo-Irish fiction, silver-fork novels, and the Romantic period. Explanatory notes explain obscure references and contexts, identify allusions to other writers, and provide translations of any non-English or archaic words. Selena itself is a revelation in its frank treatment of the darker aspects of Tighe's world, including parents who mistreat, cheat, or fail their children and spouses who commit adultery or betray one another emotionally. At the same time, it is magnificent in its stunning and moving portrayals of romantic love, of the possibility and importance of female friendship, of the difficult necessity of choosing sense over sensibility, and of the need for women and men to choose self-enhancing vocations. This extraordinary novel is destined to open up new ways of thinking by scholars of the Romantic era and the history of the novel.

‘Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945’ is a study of the history of reading Jane Austen’s novels. It discusses Austen’s own ideas about books and readers, the uses she makes of her reading, and the aspects of her style that are related to the ways in which she has been read. The volume considers the role of editions and criticism in directing readers’ responses, and presents and analyses a variety of source material related to the ordinary readers who read Austen’s works between 1786 and 1945.