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Conclusion
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Conclusion 1212 More than a decade ago, Theresa M. Kelley and Paula R. Feldman concluded their introductory essay to their groundbreaking collection of essays on Romantic-era women’s writing with the statement that “on every level, much remains to be done to specify the shape of Romantic women’s careers and to situate those careers in something like a general (or particulate) field theory of Romanticism, defined by differences and new instabilities as much as or more than by similarities or by a tightly focused set of attributes” (10). Despite the remarkable volume of scholarship on the subject over the past several decades, what Kelley and Feldman said then remains true today. The proliferation of textual materials in both print and electronic forms has lent new access to the works (and the lives) of many writers whose names had vanished from literary history over the course of some two centuries. The editorial work that has accompanied the recovery of these texts has, moreover, reminded us of the complexity of the social, political, and economic circumstances in which these writers worked, were read, and were reviewed, just as it has helped, too, to draw a clearer picture of the day-to-day details of the publishing industry in Romantic-era Britain. At the same time, important new research has provided a far more detailed and accurate account of the significant changes that transpired in that publishing industry , changes that wholly altered the nature of “reading” as both a pastime and an avocation. The changes in the demographics of readerships, which were both diversifying and growing larger, were attended by significant changes in what was published, in what form, and by which sorts of publishers, as William St. Clair has documented with particular clarity in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Circulating libraries, which had risen to prominence in the 1790s and then grown exponentially through the Regency, played an increasingly important role in reading practices in Britain, where it became less necessary to own the books that one read 292 British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community when for a flexible and relatively reasonable fee one could have virtually unlimited access to both the established classics and the latest titles. Finally, periodical publication increased during the period, in terms of both the number of journals that were published and, more important, the number of copies that were produced of each issue. Mechanical and technological advancements made possible the production of quantities of journals—and even more dramatically, newspapers—that were undreamed of three decades earlier, and the production and distribution of books, too, was impacted by comparable advances. Literacy increased as well, in consequence of the wider availability of printed texts, even if many of those texts were not what we usually think of as “literary” in nature so much as didactic (e. g., conduct books and sermons) or occupationally “practical” (e.g., schoolbooks or books on cookery, husbandry , and vocational training). But reading—as publishers and the government both recognized—is an activity that easily becomes habit forming, even addictive. The market expanded as copies became cheaper, as their numbers grew, and as reading communities of all sorts became a major feature of British culture. Women were active in all of this, both as producers and as consumers, as this book has shown. Recent research on print culture and the history of the book in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan remark, opens fresh perspectives on “the intellectual effects of a widening cultural market” in which women were discovering new and profitable ways to participate (3). But the expansion and diversification of the literary market had its own consequences for what was written and published. In Living by the Pen, Cheryl Turner demonstrates that the woman who aimed to support herself and her family through her own literary activity had to take into account market factors over which she had little control, whether it be the (usually meager) sums which publishers paid for new works, the vagaries of pricing and distribution that affected sales (or library loans) and hence literary reputation, or the moral and ideological presumptions and biases of her reviewers. At the same time, especially in fiction, women authors were already beginning to be “edged out” of the market—or forced into particular niches of that market—by male authors who perceived that there were substantial profits to be made; the remarkable numbers of popular if undistinguished novels published by...