Free Book History Talk at the Clark

This lecture will look at the processes whereby women reached print during this period, and the attitudes and practices of those in the book trade towards woman-authored copy. Publishers were becoming attentive to the gender as well as the rank and circumstances of authors; women judged their publisher a monster or a hero less on the basis of contract terms and honesty than on sympathy with the particular predicament of the female author. The relations between these two groups illuminate the interface between a system of interaction based on traditional social roles and a new world of primarily commercial transactions.

Isobel Grundy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta (formerly Henry Marshall Tory Professor). She has published Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (1986), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements, 1990), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1999), and many articles and book chapters including “Women Readers, Writers, and the Market for Women’s Books” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, ed. Michael Suarez and Michael Turner (2009). With Susan Brown and Patricia Clements, she is a creator of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press online, regularly expanded and updated since 2006.