Format: Paperback
Description:
Exploring territory seldom visited by feminist scholars, Ann Messenger in this new book presents eight studies of literary relationships between men and women writers, ranging from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays show men and women working together, praising and criticizing each other's work, borrowing -- and changing -- each other's plots and characters, recording their different perceptions of their common world. From Dryden's praise of Anne Killigrew, through Gay's and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's collaboration on a town eclogue, Thomas Southerne's dramatizations of novels by Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood's version of the Spectator, to Cornelia Knight's sequel to Rasselas, these relationships demonstrate that men and women writers inhabited the same literary world, shared the traditions of the mainstream of English literature.