The Achievement of Scholarly Authority for Women: Trends in the Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Fiction

This essay offers a broadly drawn sketch of some representative questions and methods that have emerged since the Caucus was founded in 1973, by observing trends in current work, and by broaching some predictions about directions that scholarly work by members of the Caucus might be expected to take in the future, and provides a bibliography of primary and secondary works (mostly limited to book-length studies of fiction with an emphasis on gender) to give a sense of the breadth of the work of eighteenth-century female writers, and to reveal how eighteenth-century generic divisions were not always as stable as critics suppose.