Despite three decades of groundbreaking feminist scholarship, the project of writing women's literary history is still, to an extent, overshadowed by the critical narratives about professionalism, gender and the literary that were being constructed and contested in these writers' own lifetimes, and which subsequent generations of scholars have resisted rethinking. This book sought to break down this resistance by exploring women writers' negotiation of a series of defining moments in literary history through their responses to the manual/intellectual labour axis around which this history unfolded, and to which that history is still – often prejudicially for women writers – subject. By making work visible in eighteenth-century writings by women, the intention has not been simply to uncover something that has always been there, but to offer some account for eighteenth-century studies' unwillingness fully to acknowledge labour's crucial, if vexed, presence in imaginative and nonimaginative prose of the period and, further, to suggest the costs of colluding with assumptions about gender, work and women's writing which would play such a vital part in the ‘Great Forgetting’ of female authors in the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines Charlotte Smith's treatment of labour, primarily in the fiction, in order to tease out its implications for the novels' arguments about gender, domesticity and authorship. It begins with an examination of Smith's figuring of manual, affective and intellectual labour in Marchmont (1796), arguably her fullest contribution to contemporary debates on woman's work, to reveal how the novel retriangulates its author's rhetoric about the relation between women's work, domesticity and abjection, thus paving the way for a reassessment of Smith's (Lockean) self-conceptualization of her authorial labour as a form of inalienable property. Smith's figuring of writing as work was not simply a strategy to gain her readers' sympathy; rather, it was an attempt to break down the barriers that prevented women writers from laying claim to the new models of literary professionalism which were being cemented in this period. Only when we, like Smith, grapple with the complex question that is women's work can we recuperate her distinctive and ambitious construction of professional authorship as an embodied activity which was simultaneously a labour of mind, body and heart – and, unequivocally, women's work.

This chapter introduces John Donne, a writer whose work has been analysed for traces of his precise religious allegiances, noting that the current study has chosen some of Donne's poems and aims to study his texts as performances, with little to no regard for the underlying ‘meanings’ found in the texts. It then studies the concept of performance and several performance theories, arguing the merits of conducting a performative analysis on texts from the early modern period. Finally, the chapter explains why John Donne – along with several of his works – was chosen to be analysed for the present study.

This chapter notes Odoevsky's story The Witness as an important source for certain events in the autobiographical confession of the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. it also considers Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed. These three works contribute to a considerably wider ensuing discussion of the ‘confessional’ motif in modern fiction, going back to the Gothic period and extending into the present century.

This chapter discusses the passionate connections between Donne's divine and worldly poetry. It shows that while Donne's erotic poems are more indebted to religious metaphor, his nineteen ‘Holy Sonnets’ rely more on erotic imagery. The chapter then analyses and compares Donne's religiously erotic poems with his erotically religious poetry. It determines that Donne's erotic poetry views love as a form of (artful) performance and engages in some form of histrionics of love making, also showing that role-play and theatricality are two main features of Donne's devotional and erotic writings.

This chapter investigates the musical story through Odoevsky's fictional ‘biography’ of Johann Sebastian Bach, and preceding works, particularly in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann. It aims to examine an early prose work by Boris Pasternak, his Suboctave Story (written in 1916–17, but first published only in 1977). Pasternak's never quite completed novella, this chapter argues, may be dependent to a considerable extent on Odoevsky's depiction of the young Bach and his creation of musical atmosphere.

Late in Elizabeth's reign and well into James's, some members of the elite chose to erect what they termed ‘castles’, structures superficially fortified in a style that has been labelled ‘Spenserian’ after the poet of Elizabethan chivalry, Edmund Spenser. The question posed in this chapter is whether the continued tradition of defended residences in Ireland was related to this English ‘chivalric revival’ in aristocratic architecture. Moreover, the houses built by the elite in Ireland during the Plantation Period no doubt projected power and status, but a firmer understanding of this elite depends upon whether they saw themselves as a colonial or an imperial ruling class.

This chapter takes a look at ignorance in modern poetry. Ignorance and authorial nescience is well established as a principle of literary composition, especially in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. The chapter reveals that declarations of authorial ignorance became some form of a rite of passage during the twentieth century, unlike during the last century, where ignorance became something of a mark of pride or a clannish badge of membership. It also examines the various ways in which the question of poetic ignorance appears in the poets' conceptions of their work and their working methods, suggests that poetic ignorance – as it is commonly presented by contemporary poets – has an incisive political charge, and discusses Infantino's political ignorance theory.

This chapter considers the place of the mother figure in the representation of history, focusing on the typology adumbrated in the first two chapters as a quality of narrative in late sixteenth-century history plays. Elizabethan chronicles imply a teleology that offers a reading of history in terms of a grand scheme structured around causes and events. The chapter suggests that motherhood in history plays operates against the dynamics of teleology to offer alternative readings of historical episodes. The meanings carried by the mother bisect chronology to assert a mythic and macrocosmic history that insists upon an alternative context for the reading of the play as ‘story’. Beginning with Dr Thomas Legge's Latin play Richardus Tertius and followed by a discussion of George Peele's Edward I, and finally with an examination of the role of Queen Margaret in William Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, the chapter argues that motherhood works as a kind of narrative event, plotted as an intervention in the iteration of chronologically organised occurrences to complicate the dramatic representation, and thus the political and moral implications of history.

This chapter discusses female travel writers, who normally wrote from a perspective characterised by the nature of their personal domestic experience, and notes that Kavanagh was also subject to some form of gender censure and restrictiveness. It studies Kavanagh's A Summer and Winter in the Two Sicilies, in which she uses a domestic approach and comments on the gender politics and cultural contradictions of life in the two Sicilies. The chapter then refers to women travellers, and observes that Kavanagh presents a prominent voice as she draws on the context of cultural ‘differences’ in Italian and English women. It concludes that her interest in and delivery of the experiences of women are a form of political writing in itself.

English theatre had always combined entertainment with the transmission of moral, Christian and political ideas and had developed its conventions accordingly. The rediscovery of classical dramatic texts for use in grammar schools and the advent of cheap printing made possible the writing and dissemination of translations and imitations that had a significant effect upon drama. Models that addressed the mother in new ways became available as the works of Greek and Roman dramatists, and appeared in translation throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. The mother figure was measured against her counterparts in newly available and popular narratives, notably the work of Seneca. In a discussion of the Latin play Roxana, William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, connections between maternity and the depiction of violence are traced to show how an assertion of the maternal, both in rhetoric and through dramatic spectacle, serves to emblematise both the causes and consequences of conflict and to elicit an affective response that invites reconsideration of the political in the light of the personal.