Introduction

For decades scholars have worked to restore to women writers the important role they played in eighteenth-century literature, and, as curricula and literary histories demonstrate, those efforts have succeeded. Recently, in the context of increased interest in material conditions of production and functional logistics of the print trade, we realise how much remains to discover about the role of women in this emergent market. Although we still do not know as much as we need to, we do know that women were active in the commercial print trade in many ways: as publishers, printers, booksellers, as patrons for other writers – often women writers – as translators and editors. As many women writers of this period have been retrieved from the oblivion that earlier literary histories consigned them to, scholars are turning their sights to the mass of women – from all social strata, high and low – who made a living from this burgeoning publishing trade, the ‘work of print‘, as Lisa Maruca asserts (2007).

Despite a steady stream of recent scholarship including an entire issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly and the Edinburgh University Press volume on women in eighteenth-century British publishing, women's work can be difficult to recuperate. During the early modern period, for example, women often belonged to a vibrant economy outside the home or in shops attached to the home, but a few decades later, so-called advances in the eighteenth century that gave men more professional opportunities resulted in women having fewer; in the middle and aspiring classes the idea that women should work outside the home and for wages was discouraged. Scholars seeking information about women in the print trade during this period have encountered roadblocks because women's work was often obscured by insufficient public representation. That does not mean that women were inactive; rather, it means that women's labour was constrained. The rhetorical question Isobel Grundy asks, ‘What difference did women make to the book trade during the long eighteenth century?’, is meaningful, because she asks not whether women were in the print trade, but how (Grundy 2009: 146). Grundy documents women working against criticism of them as authors and as professionals, showing that women were active in all aspects of the book trade. She reminds us that women were not always noted as owners or operators of a family business, as they were not formal members of guilds or property owners.