Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.

Autorentext
MELANIE BIGOLD is a Lecturer at Cardiff University, UK. She has published work on eighteenth-century women writers, and transcribed and edited manuscripts for The Slave Trade Debate. She is currently working on a joint biography of George Ballard and Elizabeth Elstob, and leading a project on marginalia and provenance in the Cardiff Rare Books collection.

Inhalt
Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Note on transcription Introduction Letter-writing, Community, and Virtuous Exemplarity: Elizabeth Rowe's Theatre of Happiness A Saint Everlasting: Elizabeth Rowe and Biographical Exemplarity 'The new and untrodden path': Catharine Cockburn, Philosophy and the Republic of Letters '[H]ow Obscure her Lot': Catharine Cockburn's Double Afterlife Elizabeth Carter: 'a very extraordinary Phaenomenon in the Republick of Letters' Elizabeth Carter and the Theatrum Mundi Bibliography Notes Index