| Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen | |
| Author: | Dale Spender |
| Cover Artist: | Marion Dalley |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Feminist literary history |
| Publisher: | Pandora Press, London |
| Publisher2: | Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York |
| Pub Date: | 1986 |
| Media Type: | |
| Pages: | 357 |
| Isbn: | 0863580815 |
| Isbn Note: | 9780863580819 |
| Oclc: | 1036783258 |
| Dewey: | 823/.009/9287 |
| Congress: | PR113 .S63 1986 |
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Mothers of the Novel is divided into three parts. Part I treats a series of seventeenth-century women writers, only some of whom would have been familiar to most readers in 1986: Aphra Behn (1640–1689), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Anne Clifford (1590–1676), Anne Fanshawe (1625–1680), Eliza Haywood (1693–1756), Lucy Hutchinson (1618–1681), Delarivière Manley (1663 –1724), Katherine Philips (1631–1664), Anna Weamys (fl. 1651), and Mary Wroth (1587– 1653).
Part II includes a list of one hundred and six (106) early women novelists little-known at the time of writing, and the titles of 568 of their novels. Many of these works have since been reprinted and become subjects of academic study, though a proportion of these writers remain relatively obscure or, in some cases, unidentified.
Part III treats a series of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers from the list: Mary Brunton, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Lennox, Amelia Opie, Sydney Owenson, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Pandora Press released a companion "Mothers of the Novel" series of twenty novels by sixteen authors between 1986 and 1989: