Novel Histories describes how women authors approached the relationship between history and fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. What drew novelists like Catharine Macaulay, Sophia Lee, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Jane Porter, Mary Shelley and Lucy Aikin to this subject? And what drew you to them?

In Novel Histories, I argue that during a time when British women’s poltical status was ambiguous, history writing provided a public forum for women writers. During the Enlightenment, women’s legal and political circumstances remained unchanged or even worsened in Britain. Not surprisingly, generic classifications in the long eighteenth century became just as restrictive as gender roles. Although British women contributed to print culture more heavily and in all genres – newspapers, periodicals, religious and political writings, school books, almanacs, and fiction – with the professionalization of history writing at the end of the eighteenth century, manywomen writers turned from history writingto frequently to historical fiction.

I posit that the “scoial turn” in history writing during the eighteenth century assisted women history writersin circumventing these increasingly restrictive prescriptions regarding gender and genre. The “social turn” in historiography forwarded as “sympathetic” historical discourse that engendered a literariness in history writing. That is, in the mid-eighteenth century, hisory and biography began to incorporate components of the private sphere into the public sphere of history writing through the use of letters, opinions from contemporaries, gossip, innuendo, and priavte papers. The writers of histories and historical fiction I examine take up these historiographical challenges to fully enter the republic of letters. This “sympathetic” historiography allowed a deep embeddingof political discussion inthese histories, as well as a bridge connecting women’s historical fiction to historiographical movements in history writing. Indeed,the writers of historical fiction and biography took cues from the generic andhistoriographical changes ineighteenth-century history writing to also enter civic discourse.

The writers of histories and historical fiction explored in Novel Histories not only embrace the invention in historiography, but also modulate and expand upon genre conventions. Wjile Catherine Macaulay incorporates “social discourse” into historical narrative, Helen Maria Williams’s epistolary history fully embraces the literariness of Romantic history and, finally, Lucy Aikin takes up a “modern” “narrativity” in her history writing – historiographical and generic turns that mirror and forward each writer’s political views. I argue Catharine Macaulay’s History of England (1763-1783) emerges as a civic act in her use of literary tropes associated with women to give weight and political positioning to her history, while Helen Maria Williams’s epistolary narrative in her history Letters from France (1790-96) embodies literary figures of the heart to authenticate her radical commentary on the French Revolution. Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810) makes transparent the problematic gender and genre poltics that aresuggested in the earlier histories of Macaulay and Williams, and she fully realizes how to convey these complexities in herhistory Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1818).

In turn, the historical fiction in this study takes up the “sympathetic” shift in history writing through generic conventions that institute a historiographical and political bearing. The authors I include move through the more conventional generic and historical narrative of Sophia Lee and Ann Yearsley through the unconventional heroic romances of Jane Porter to counterfactual historical romance of Mary Shelley. Lee’s The Recess (1783-85) and Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (1791) insist upon the facticity and political prestige of history writing in the gothic and sentimental literary genres to address contemporary politics. By highlighting the succession crisis during Queen Elizabeth’s reign through the Gothic genre, for example, Lee speaks to eighteenth-century fear concerning illegitimacy, monarchical usurpation, and social leveling. Similarly, Yearsley’s play calls for a benevolent government in England through the sentimentality of her hero Goodwin while overtly alluding to the French Revolution. Porter’s romances advance a conservative Tory political agenda advocating monarchism and natiuralized social hierarchy, through a kind of biblical typology in her tales of the past. In turn, Shelley’s Valperga (1823) arguments William’s discursive subjectivity and imagines an enlightened political community based in the sympathetic and rational government of a fictional female ruler, which she juxtaposes to the tyrannical government of a historical figure. Thus, the writers in Novel Histories reveal the diversity of British women writing history during this period: these women comprise historical and literary writers, whose resulting fame and popularity vary as well as does their political allegiances, which span commonwealth republicanism to radical republicanism and Toryism to Whiggism.

Congratulations on receiving a “Highly Recommended” review in the journal Choice for Novel Histories! The reviewer points out that your work “complicates the intersection of genre and gender during the period and helps to explain how women explored a variety of issues in fluid, complex literart forms.” What were your goals in “complicating” these issues?

In order to move beyond simple vultural binaries – such as masculine/feminine or classical/popular – I posit that investigation into women’s history writing must encompass the immense impact of generic rules and gender politics on both the writing and the reception of women’s history writing and examine more deeply the interconnections among gender, generic convention, and political ideology in this body of literature. The political instability in women’s social position during the long eighteenth century underlies the incongruities in their history writing often played out through their treatment of generic and literary conventions. Starting with the recognition that ideas about gender and genre were still evolving in the long eighteenth-century, in Novel Histories, I trace the literary, social, and political implications of the generic and historiographical shifts in British women’s history writing from 1760 through 1830.

The reviewer also points out that your work calls for a revision of current ideas about boundaries between “eighteenth century” and “Romantic” studies. Was this your aim?

Yes, as I maintain in Novel Histories, the development of British women’s history writing for a more “modern” narrativized history through historical fiction and historical biographies points to the consistent evolution in women’s literary and civic engagement throughout the long eighteenth century, cutting through the literary periods of the eighteenth century and Romanticism. Further critical work on such interconnections among the histories by women writers will enhance our knowledge of this literary history.

What are your current and future research plans?

My current book project, “Traumatic Subjects: Nationalism in British Romanticism,” uses theoretical conceptions of trauma to elucidate the emotional cost of imperialism through confluences between personal trauma in early nineteenth-century British literature and the emergence of British nationalism, a link that literary scholars have not fully taken into account.More precisely, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Persuasion (1816), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) the vulnerable protagonist cathects painful, traumatic events, creating a tale that shapes her sociopolitical worldview. These traumatic events, however, posses an “incomprehensibility” that thereby precludes having immediate access to historical experience. Only in retrospect is the trauma assimilated. There lies the analogue to national ideologies and the traumatic personal history of the protagonist, marked by repression and “misremembering,” foreground a mythic national narrative.

–Kathleen Shultz