An implicit confederacy: The collective literary imagination of eighteenth-century women writers

The body of literature on which this project focuses is a somewhat random sampling of the works of an implicit confederacy of women writers who generated a rich literary legacy from the middle of the eighteenth century and just beyond into the first decade of the nineteenth century. Drawing most heavily on Jane Austen, the inheritor of this distinctly- female tradition, I chose twelve novels to represent hundreds like them in style, imagery, and theme. To clarify transition from one work to another, the novels are identified by the following abbreviations, given here with their authors and dates of publication: (B) Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth (1811); (C) Cecilia, by Frances Burney (1782); (EM) Emma, by Jane Austen (1816); (EV) Eyelina, by Frances Burney (1778); (FQ) The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox (1752); (MP) Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen (1814); (M) Maria: or The Wrongs of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1797); (MU) Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe (1794); (NA) Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen (1818); (P) Persuasion, by Jane Austen (1818); (PP) Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen (1813); (SS) A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald (1791).