This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

This collection aims to give a chronological insight into the evolution of conduct literature, from its early roots in the Renaissance period through to the dramatically different role that women played at the emergence of the 20th century.

The material presented in this six-volume set moves away from courtly etiquette, adopting a more middle-class, domestic focus, and includes facsimile reproductions of sermons, poems, narratives and cookery books.

Eliza Haywood was one of the most prolific English writers in the Age of the Enlightenment. Her career, from Love in Excess (1719) to her last completed project The Invisible Spy (1755) spanned the gamut of genres: novels, plays, advice manuals, periodicals, propaganda, satire, and translations. Haywood’s importance in the development of the novel is now well-known. A Spy on Eliza Haywood links this with her work in the other genres in which she published at least one volume a year throughout her life, demonstrating how she contributed substantially to making women’s writing a locus of debate that had to be taken seriously by contemporary readers, as well as now by current scholars of political, moral, and social enquiries into the eighteenth century. Haywood’s work is essential to the study of eighteenth-century literature and this collection of essays continues the growing scholarship on this most important of women writers.

Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Although didactic novels were frequently conventional in structure, they provided a venue for women to uphold, to undermine, to interrogate, but most importantly, to write about acceptable social codes and values. The essays discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected and demonstrate the reforming potential of this feminine and ostensibly constricting genre. Focusing on works by novelists from Jane West to Susan Ferrier, the collection argues that didactic novels within these decades were particularly feminine; that they were among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; and that they often blurred political and ideological boundaries. The first part addresses both conservative and radical texts of the 1790s to show their shared focus on institutional reform and indebtedness to Mary Wollstonecraft, despite their large ideological range. In the second part, the ideas of Hannah More influence the ways authors after the French revolution often linked the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity. The essays demonstrate the means by which the didactic genre works as a corrective not just on a personal and individual level, but at the political level through its focus on issues such as inheritance, slavery, the roles of women and children, the limits of the novel, and English and Scottish nationalism. This book offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging picture of how women with various ideological and educational foundations were involved in British political discourse during a time of radical partisanship and social change.

What did it mean to be old in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England? This eight-volume edition brings together selections from medical treatises, sermons, legal documents, parish records, almshouse accounts, private letters, diaries and ballads, to investigate cultural and medical understanding of old age in pre-industrial England.