Dr Sarah Prescott

Staff Publications

Her monograph Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690-1740 and a co-edited collection of essays on Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 were both published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2003.

Sarah regularly reviews for a range of journals and newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women's Writing, New Welsh Review.  She is a member of the editorial board for Blackwell's on-line journal Literature Compass.

Books

Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690-1740 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), x + 237pp.

The dominant model of female authorship in the period 1690-1740 is London-centred, professional and fiction-oriented. In this engaging study, Sarah Prescott argues that alternative contexts for publication and different models of authorship were equally influential in shaping women’s involvement in literary culture. In addition to acknowledging the impact of literary London on the careers, images and publication patterns of a variety of women writers, Prescott stresses the importance of provincial networks and non-metropolitan literary systems. The focus on alternative locations and contexts as influences on women writers does not mean that the commercial side of female authorship is neglected. Rather, women could use provincialism, and all it implied, as a way to shape their literary authority and market their work. This study provides an exciting and thought-provoking revision of our current conceptions of women’s participation in literary culture.

Reviews of Women, Authorship and Literary Culture

"Prescott's book successfully dismantles the arbitrary distinctions often drawn between professional and amateur, metropolitan and provincial, and scandalous and pious writers.  [...]  The close reading of the works of Jane Brereton, probably the least known of Prescott's case studies, brilliantly demolishes so many of the critical assumptions that still obscure readings of women's poetry in the period."  Notes and Queries

"It is extraordinary to realise how little we have known about writers like Rowe and her contemporaries, some of whom, such as Penelope Aubin, Jane Barker, Jane Brereton, Martha Fowke Sansom and Elizabeth Thomas, Prescott recovers here.  In this work of detailed scholarship, common place assumptions about women being denied a place in literary culture are quietly but determinedly revised, with the result that new ways of looking and new chronologies are made possible."  Women's History Review.

“One of the strengths of this well-researched book is its engagement with recent feminist debates about women’s entry into the literary marketplace. […] Fully cognizant of recent theoretical debates about gender and authorship, but confident in the findings of her own original research, Prescott makes an important contribution to literary histories of the early eighteenth century which will be enlightening to both students and researchers in the field”.  The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (2005)

 “One of the strengths of this book is its breadth of analysis. Moreover, this approach allows Prescott to demonstrate her central argument: that we need to rethink women’s literary history by adopting a more ‘pluralist’ model of analysis that is properly capable of handling the complexities of women’s work in literary culture. This is an astute, elegant, and lively book that will be necessary reading for scholars in the field.” The Modern Language Review (2005)

Women and Poetry, 1660-1750, edited by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), xiii + 258pp.

The period from the Restoration to the 1750s sees the emergence of women as professional poets. This new collection of commissioned essays provides an overview of all aspects of women’s poetic practice as they began their fraught negotiation of the public world of letters. Usefully divided into three sections, covering biographies of the leading poets, critical readings and cultural contexts, the poets discussed include Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Leapor. The essays address questions of social status and public image, the shift from manuscript to print, exploitation in the literary marketplace, the use of classical and biblical models, politics, satire and the emergence of labouring-class women poets. The book features original contributions from Margaret J. M. Ezell, Germaine Greer, Jennifer Keith, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Kathryn E. King, Donna Landry, Rebecca M. Mills, Valerie Rumbold, Jane Spencer, Carol Shiner Wilson and Susan Wiseman. This volume is the only critical anthology to address all aspects of women’s poetry in this period. 

Sarah has edited a special issue of Women's Writing (Vol. 7 No. 3).

Journal Articles

"Gray's Pale Spectre": Evan Evans, Thomas Gray and the rise of Welsh bardic nationalism, Modern Philology 104. 1 (August 2006): 72-95

'What Foes more dang'rous than too strong Allies?' The Society of Ancient Britons and Anglo-Welsh relations in eighteenth-century London', Huntington Library Quarterly 69.4 (December 2006): 535-554

'The Cambrian Muse:  Welsh Identity and Hanoverian Loyalty in the Poems of Jane Brereton' (1685-1740), Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.4 (2005): 587-603

'Provincial Networks, Dissenting Connections and Noble Friends: Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Female Authorship in Early Eighteenth-Century England', Eighteenth-Century Life 25.1 (2001): 29-42

'Mary Chandler, Elizabeth Rowe and 'Ralph's Miscellany': Coincidental Biographical and Bibliographical Findings', Notes and Queries (with David Shuttleton): NS48.1(March 2001) 31-34

'The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s'  Women's Writing 7.3 (2000): 427-445

'Prattling, Tattling and knowing everything: public authority and the female editorial persona in the early essay-periodical', British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies (with Jane Spencer) 23.1 (2000): 43-57.

'Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: a reassessment of the pious woman novelist', Women's Writing, 1.1 (1994): 99-112

'The Palace of Fame and the Problem of Reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood', Baetyl: The Journal of Women's Literature, vol. 4 (1994): 10-35

Contributions to Books

‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe: Gender, Dissent and Whig Poetics’, in 'Cultures of Whiggism', New Essays on English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century edited by David Womersley (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2005)

‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737): Politics, Passions and Piety’, in Women and Poetry, 1660-1750, edited by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 71-78.

‘Aphra Behn: Poems’ in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, edited by David Womersley (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 224-231

‘Eliza Haywood: Fantomina’ in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, edited by David Womersley (Blackwell, 2000), pp. 277-283.