This chapter introduces Julia Kavanagh, one of many women writers of the nineteenth century who are now largely unknown. It first presents some background information on her early life, and then studies the status of domestic fiction during the Victorian era. From there, the chapter traces the progress of Kavanagh's writing career and describes her physical appearance and health. It then provides information on her family and background, as well as her communication with the editor of The Nation, Gavan Duffy. The chapter also considers Kavanagh's relationship with her estranged father, Morgan; her friendship with Charlotte Brontë; and her convictions on the importance of the woman's voice.

This chapter explores the vulnerability of maternity and the danger for the family that proceeds from it in the context of high tragedy, through readings of Hamlet and Coriolanus. Both plays, in their complex dealings with a son's relationship to his mother, demonstrate a reworking of typology to take account of shifting ideological preoccupations. In both plays, the mother has a public and political role that is dangerous and which makes her son vulnerable in a fragile political world. The mother as characterised may be sympathetic, but her maternity is destabilising, provocative of violence and a disturbance of family structure. The mother figure is here no longer a pathetic signifier of the personal consequences of political action; rather, she infects the political and creates danger through her own agency: an unhappy collision between her personal desires, her condition as mother and matters of state.

This chapter examines the cultural attitudes towards women novelists during Kavanagh's lifetime. It shows Kavanagh's importance as a novelist who drew on the cultural contradictions of the period, and suggests that her insights into gender and class differences were essential to her writing. The chapter then studies six of Kavanagh's works, including Daisy Burns and Rachel Gray, and aims to demonstrate Kavanagh's diversity as a novelist during the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines some applications of classicism in both form and content. This discussion focuses on the production of political meanings. It studies the extension of French neo-classical influence to the Elizabethan theatre in its most popular and public form, and tries to declassicise French drama itself. This chapter also studies the characters of Caesar and Brutus, the former becoming the epitome of greatness fatally tainted by ambition, and focuses on adaptations of classical machinery.

This chapter studies representations of melancholy, specifically in the writings of David Hume and Henry James, and states that trees, which are figures of monstrous outgrowths, are usually represented as both analogues for, and causes of, melancholia. It then suggests that the pervasive literary discourse of melancholy is connected to ignorance and the discourses of agnoiology and scepticism, and also tries to establish the pervasiveness of the link between melancholy and the (figure of the) tree.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to complicate the conventional narrative about labour, gender and authorship posited by Samuel Crisp, and often endorsed by literary and historical scholarship, both by pointing to the vital and valued role that work of various kinds played in texts by middling and genteel women writers publishing during the later eighteenth century, and by revealing labour's centrality to these authors' self-conceptualization as women and as literary professionals. It then discusses men's work and women's leisure; domesticity, the novel and the invisibility of women's work; and the debate on women's work. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter considers the problem of literary ignorance using the perspective of the nature of narrative form. It studies the narrative form of Joseph Conrad's short stories, and suggests that a literary agnoiology would be partly able to account for the problem of Conrad's fiction and its relation to his life. The chapter notes that the inability to see – which is, in this sense, nescience – is natural not only to the thematics of Conrad's ‘short’ fiction and to his life, but also to the process of composition, the nature of short-story writing and to Conrad's poetics of the short and long story.

This chapter studies Kavanagh's perspectives on some of the women she discusses in Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century, noting that her main purpose was a celebration of women and of the presence of women in history. It shows that Kavanagh focuses primarily on women of privilege, whose position gave them immense social influence and power over men, and who helped change the course of eighteenth-century France. The chapter determines that Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century serves as an important contribution to women's history, since it succeeds in drawing attention to the experiences and lives of women during that period.

This chapter discusses John Keats, who can be considered as the kind of poet who is particularly concerned with asking about what ignorance feels like, and examines the Keatsian urge towards anepistemology, or the poet's apparent desire for ignorance and his resistance to the epistemophilic drive. It determines that his poems present the concern with agnoiology that is clearly expressed in his letters, which are characteristically concerned with the states of ignorance. The chapter also shows that Keats's poetic dream of hypnological uncertainty is expressed in at least one of his letters.

This chapter examines Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, which he wrote after he came down with an illness that nearly killed him – or so he believed – observing that there are several important points of contact between devotional and epistolary modes in this work. It shows that Devotions is mostly focused on the speaker's communion and communication with God. The chapter determines that proof of Donne's personal attitude towards the advantages of verse over prose – and vice versa – can be found in his prose letters. An analysis of Donne's use of verse as opposed to prose is included.

The Elizabethan court poet Edmund Spenser resided at Kilcolman Castle from around 1588 to October 1598, shortly before his death in January 1599. Granted a 3,000 acre estate by Elizabeth, Spenser repaired and improved the castle, a small medieval enclosure on a hilltop overlooking a marshy lake and bog. Its fate was to be burned and abandoned, then later used as a quarry for building stone. Archaeological fieldwork directed by the writer took place at Kilcolman from 1993 to 1996 to determine what evidence still existed for Spenser's occupancy of the castle. The archaeological interpretation in this chapter tries to establish a historical and material context for Spenser's activities and his ideas.

This chapter examines a connection between Jacobean drama and contemporary discourses concerning the Protestant family and its relation to the state. Taking such diverse texts as William Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties and King James's writing on government, as well as the popular genre of mothers' legacies, it suggests that the representation and reception of motherhood in drama is coloured by shifts in religious and political pressures rather than because of a new celebration of affective family relations. William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi revisit the focus upon motherhood and meaning treated in the first chapter. In different ways, the potency of the mothers in The Winter's Tale and The Duchess of Malfi is, to quote Hermione, ‘preserv'd’ and memorialised so that motherhood transcends mortality to offer the unthreatening and unthreatened reassurance of everlasting and unconditional love.