Naming and Narratives of Authorship in Women's Book History

authorship is a fraught category at the intersection of feminist literary history and women's book history, a node for the often-overlooked dialogue between them. The cross-disciplinary conversation has made women's book history conceptually fertile and methodologically inventive, and it has led to shifts in the narratives and classifications within feminist literary scholarship. Scholars privilege the category of "author" in feminist recovery projects, even while the implied agency of authorship is diluted by methodological emphases on the social production of texts as objects and, increasingly, large textual corpuses gathered into datasets for distant reading. With their focus on authorship, the three essays in this section disclose productive tensions between literary and book histories.

Each essay contextualizes authorship within the moment that saw, according to standard accounts of print culture, the birth of the modern author, constitutively male, who was supported by legal rights to intellectual property. Kirstyn Leuner grapples with the historical mutability, misidentification, and routine occlusion of women in library metadata. She views cataloging as a feminist act, pointing to the role that name authority records play in making women in print history findable for recovery research. E. J. Clery suggests that, for those authors who are established literary figures like Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist methods of approaching the book history archive can reframe dominant historical narratives. Publishers' records, in particular, contain evidence that revises long-standing assumptions about the "professional woman writer" and speaks to present-day feminist politics, the #MeToo movement, and the campaign to close the gender pay gap. For Kandice Sharren, studying archival evidence means being attentive to the ways that material texts can mediate and shape an author's reception. Her case study of a single poem by Dorothy Wordsworth demonstrates how the manuscript and print forms in which it survives mirror the contradictions of her position in literary history as a woman writer with prestigious literary associations but private amateur status.

By raising gender-based questions about cataloging practices, economic injustice, labor conditions, and choice of medium, these essays demonstrate that not all forms of authorship have been treated equally. Feminist recovery projects have rewritten the narrative in which authorship was figured as individual masculine genius. However, for women authors, the differences and continuums between professional and amateur, print and manuscript, and cataloged and not-cataloged hierarchize who we recover and how fully we recover them. Our section exposes, and potentially replicates, some of these inequalities, leading us to ask: Why are Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth the subjects of entire essays, whereas M. E. Arnold and Jane Merryweather appear only as examples in an essay about the need for more equitable cataloging to enable research of little-known authors? Why is Wollstonecraft's writing understood as individual achievement, but Wordsworth's often read as a function of her brother's? How is agency allocated in a bibliographical network, like that constructed by Francis Stainforth's library, versus professional and familial networks, such as the Joseph Johnson and Wordsworth circles? Accounting for such disparities requires us to acknowledge how constructions of authorship are by necessity belated and mediated, deeply rooted in narratives about gender, form, and professional and personal relationships.

A baseline in our collaborative debates has been the question of how, as authors ourselves, our own desire to name and categorize influences our narratives and categories of authorship. Together, our essays advocate for capturing the complexity of authorship in the long eighteenth century, by assigning and describing a new category of the professional writer called the precariat, centering the name "Dorothy Wordsworth" to identify a Romantic-era manuscript writer with a brother who also wrote, and improving representation of women writers in library-catalog name-authority records. We are not removing names or categories; ours is an additive method that bespeaks feminist literary critics' and book historians' power to correct omissions from historical and literary records. Even so, the pitfalls that accompany the deployment of authorial naming should be acknowledged, such as its tendency to oversimplify literary production and obscure other forms of agency. At its outer limits, does authorial naming...