The Writer's Craft: Novel Making in the Eighteenth Century

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While it is common today to refer to the writer’s craft, such language was not freely available to think through authorship in the eighteenth century, a period in which literature was being professionalised in particular, and highly gendered, ways. As Martha Woodmansee argued, the model of the author as craftsman and master of inherited rules of rhetoric and poetics dominant in the Renaissance retained only limited purchase by the early to mid-eighteenth century. By the Romantic period, this authorial model had been largely, if not entirely, displaced by the similarly masculinised notion of author as artist of original genius.

As this talk reveals, many women authors of the long eighteenth century sought to resist this paradigm, and a significant number of these writers did so through a recuperation of the writer as craft specialist. It was precisely in its oppositional status - as the product of hand-not-mind, the feminine-not-masculine, the amateur-not-professional, and, pre-eminently as not-art - that craft could be leveraged by women writers - including Jane Austen, Jane Barker, Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding, Catherine Hutton, Hannah More, Lady Frances Norton - as a powerful literary aesthetic and feminine even feminist epistemology. It elucidates how craft language, techniques and practice were mechanisms through which many important women writers thought through, and asserted the cultural value of, their writing practice.