Contexts, Intertexts, Metatexts: Eighteenth-Century Prose by Women

Contexts, Intertexts, Metatexts: Eighteenth-Century Prose by Women Ros Ballaster Mary Astell. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-268-9. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, eds. PopularFiction by Women 16601730 . An Anthology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ISBN 0.19-871137-9. Aphra Behn. Oroonoko, ed. Joanna Lipking. Norton Critical Editions. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-97014-0. Frances Brooke. The Excursion, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton. Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 0-8131-1979-0. Frances Burney. Evelina, ed. Kristina Straub. Bedford Cultural Editions. Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 1997. ISBN 0-312-12796-0. Elizabeth Griffith. The Delicate Distress, ed. Cynthia Booth Ricciardi and Susan Staves. Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. ISBN 0-8131-2014-4. Eliza Haywood. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, ed. Christine Blouch. Broadview Literary Texts. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1998. ISBN 1-551111-147-0. Elizabeth Inchbald. Nature and Art, ed. Shawn L. Maurer. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-265-4. Charlotte Smith. Desmond, ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd. Pickering Women's Classics. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997. ISBN 1-85196-26. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 3, April 1999 348 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION In the shaping of an interpretive community alert to the pleasures of an arguably different set of contextual, intertextual, and metatextual relationships, the metaphors of geography and topography have been key tools for feminist literary criticism. To take only the best-known example, Elaine Showalter described her book A Literature of Their Own as "an attempt to fill in the terrain between ... literary landmarks and to construct a more reliable map from which to explore the achievements of English women novelists" than "the Austen peaks, the Brontë cliffs, the Eliot range, and the Woolf hills."1 The exercise ofmapping a lost tradition, if tradition it proves to be, entails the development of a common vocabulary which readers must share and understand if they are to make sense of what they encounter. The necessity, as well as the pitfalls, of this process are both evident and ongoing. In 1980, Annette Kolodny observed that "we read well, and with pleasure, what we already know how to read."2 Her insight has remained foundational in the nearly twenty subsequent years ofreprinting and editing early writing by women. In the mid-1980s, Pandora Press produced a series of some twenty paperback reprints of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novels by women, under the general editorship of Dale Spender, as companion publications to her survey, Mothers of the Novel? The Pandora series sought to revisit the success Virago Press had enjoyed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by reprinting Victorian and Edwardian fictions by women. Each novel was printed on relatively cheap paper with no annotation except a short preface by an enthusiast: the series provided for some time the only teaching and library texts for academics working in the field. Subsequently, the major presses for paperback "classics" reprints (Penguin and Oxford) have allowed a small number ofthese works to enter their canons, and have also authorized new editions of the classic works of better-known women writers with prefaces that take account of the reappraisal, indeed "revision," generated by feminist critical debate. Penguin have not only put into paperback editions by Ros Ballaster of Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis and by Kate Lilley of Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World in their "classics" series (both originally published in hardback in Pickering Women's Classics), but also produced new textual editions of Jane Austen's novels with introductions informed by feminist interpretation. Pandora's "mothers of the novel" series assumed that general readers, lovers of the novel, would find eighteenth-century fiction by women as accessible as later works. However, without a context—a sense of the traditions, influences, and debates on which each novel draws (rather than the later tradition to which it may have contributed)—readers were often at aloss. WithoutMargaretDalziel's edition of...