Nonconformist British Women Writers, 1720-1840

FAIN: FB-54681-10

Timothy D. Whelan
Georgia Southern University (Statesboro, GA 30458)

My project, an 8-volume set for Pickering and Chatto, presents the lives and works of a remarkable coterie of Nonconformist women writers from the West Country, including Anne Steele, Mary Scott, and eight others, placing them in their historical, social and religious contexts. In their poetry, fiction, letters, and diaries, these women reveal their concern with women's education, religion, politics, and the literary culture of the last half of the eighteenth century. Though they did not move in the upper echelons of society in London, as some of the more famous Bluestockings did, these women, all connected either through family or friendship, were nevertheless immersed in the literary traditions of the age and lived a life (in many respects, a communal life) of the imagination that equals any group of women writers from the eighteenth century.