Nobody's story1994

Exploring the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century, Catherine Gallagher reveals the underlying connections between the increasing prestige of female authorship, the economy of credit and debt, and the rise of the novel. The "nobodies" of her title are not ignored, silenced, erased, or anonymous women.

Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputations, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers through the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous...