Introduction

While male writers frequently manipulated the appearance of print in eighteenth-century British fiction, women rarely considered it viable or permissible. Experimental page layout appears notably not only in works by lionized male authors such as Swift, Richardson, and Sterne, but also by obscurer figures like Kidgell or Sterne’s numerous imitators. In contrast, no dramatic counterpart to this male textual display occurs until Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in 1800. Indeed, eighteenth-century women writers persistently lament that the “female pen” is barred access to the printed page routinely granted their male counterparts, despite dramatic increases in female authorship. Such laments, I propose, must be considered in relation to, among other causes, a printing and bookselling process largely controlled by men yet dependent in a number of ways on women. Many male authors had close associations with printing houses, as we have seen in relation to Richardson and Sterne, for example. At the same time, even though a number of women worked in the print industry as booksellers, printers, printers’ assistants, and mercuries, women who wanted to publish fiction of a sophisticated and competitive nature largely shunned typographical innovation.