Discussions of gender in book history have largely been confined to recovering women’s writing and women’s reading. This has created several narratives that have governed our analysis: one being the persecuted woman writer, who is either... more
Discussions of gender in book history have largely been confined to recovering women’s writing and women’s reading. This has created several narratives that have governed our analysis: one being the persecuted woman writer, who is either openly operating in the public sphere to public stigma and condemnation, or in the private sphere and expertly navigating alternate forms of publication through manuscript; another being the passive and persecuted woman reader, whose appetite for novels especially in the long eighteenth century managed to champion an evolving form and genre that continues to be attacked today; the last being the active member of the trades either as printer, binder, or hawker, an exceptional role viewed as a blip in history writ large that is quickly subsumed by male industrialists. Despite a clear trajectory of greater involvement and activity by and for women in the trade, they nonetheless often remain shadowy figures in academic scholarship, popular criticism, and artistic acknowledgement. What I hope to consider here, then, is not just how we might recover the narratives of women in the book trades, but how we have arrived at some of these narratives ourselves.
