Professor Kathryn Ready Discusses her New Edited Collection Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression
Thu. Feb. 29, 2024
February sees the publication of Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression, a new collection edited by University of Winnipeg English Professor Kathryn Ready and David Sigler from the University of Calgary. Published by the University of Edinburgh Press, the edited volume examines the centrality of women’s writing to the history of sexuality in the Romantic period. We sat down with Professor Ready to ask her about the collection, the work involved in putting it together, and the connections the volume overall and her specific contribution has to the classes she teaches here at UWinnipeg.
First of all, congratulations! It is an enormous amount of work to put together a collection such as this, and I am sure it must be exciting for it to now be out there in the world. Could you tell us a little bit about what the collection covers and how the project came together?
Thank you, and, yes, I’d be happy to speak a little to the beginnings of this collection. My co-editor David Sigler and I first met in Chicago at the 2019 North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference. By this point, we were already familiar with each other’s work without ever having met in person. Over the course of the next few days, we had many great conversations together, including about the challenges of teaching period courses and the positive response we’d both had to introducing material from the history of sexuality into these courses. As we’d discovered independently, this material often provided an effective point of connection for students who were surprised to discover writers from centuries ago already engaging with issues related to gender and sexuality that remain very current today. This conversation led into discussion of our ongoing research and our mutual sense of a gap in the scholarship that needed to be redressed. While the study of sexuality has received extended treatment within the fields of eighteenth-century studies and Victorian studies, much less has been done in Romantic studies, especially in relation to women writers. A few months after the conference, David approached me about the possibility of working on a collection together, and the project went from there. In a nutshell, what we hoped to establish through our collection was that women’s writing was a crucial, if still underappreciated, part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period and that the period’s women writers were engaging with a wide range of topics related to sexuality, including many that are still considered highly taboo. As part of our coverage, we wanted essays on both well-known women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, and writers who are now increasingly studied and taught by eighteenth-century-ists and Romanticists such as Sarah Scott, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Mary Hays. We also specifically wanted to extend representation to the transgender writer Mary Diana Dods, who was born female but who lived their adult life as a married man, reflecting the new and exciting work that’s been done on trans history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in recent years.
The collection features an incredible array of contributors, including yourself! Can you tell us about the first of your two essays in the volume? It comes straight after your co-editor’s introduction and, in many ways, also sets out the terms of reference and the ideas at the heart of the collection, right?
We were really gratified by the enthusiastic response that we had to our Call for Papers and by the wide range of excellent essays we received from scholars at various stages in their careers, from grad students to well-established experts who have already made significant contributions to the study of sexuality, notably Richard Sha. By way of introduction to the other essays in the collection, David and I, a little unusually, decided that we would each write something, David addressing our choice of the term “transgression” to discuss women writers and sexuality during the Romantic period, and I providing an overview of key thinkers in the general history of sexuality and the scholarship that has accumulated to date related to Romanticism and sexuality, beginning with Mario Praz’ famous book The Romantic Agony (first published in Italian in 1933). My essay also addressed some of the reasons that scholars interested in the study of sexuality have come so late to considering female Romantic writers. As I argue, part of the problem stems not only from the continuing overrepresentation of male writers in Romantic studies but also from a view in medicine that gained increased traction over the course of the period, positing that women were essentially different from and less sexual than men (in a reversal of a centuries-old Western view to the contrary). However, the lack of representation of women writers in the study of sexuality during the Romantic period reflects no actual scarcity in relevant material, as we hope our collection shows.
I am curious about the connections between the classroom and the collection. Your classes and seminars on eighteenth-century literature and culture are enormously popular, and I sense there’s a real appetite out there to understand the complexity of the past, especially in relation to questions of sexuality and desire. Am I right in thinking that your second essay, on Anna Laetitia Barbauld, connects to your work in the classroom?
A great question. I would say that I’ve found—and I think many of my students have found as well—that the past is really useful in highlighting the complexity of questions related to sexuality and desire that still resonate with us today. My essay on Barbauld in the collection comes directly out of a class I continue to teach as a cross-listed fourth-year seminar and MA course: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Libertines, Whores, Mollies, and Female Husbands: Transgressive Sexuality in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century. One of the theoretical readings for this course is Thomas Laqueur’s 2003 monograph Solitary Sex, which identifies masturbation as the first historical example of the medicalizing and pathologizing of sexuality (a process that intensifies, as Michel Foucault has argued, during the late nineteenth century, especially around homosexuality). We see in the course of the eighteenth century masturbation becoming connected to a whole host of illnesses (including, ironically, STIs). This stigmatization of masturbation, in turn, affected the reputation of the novel, as moral commentators continued to dwell on the perceived multitude of unhealthy female readers who exploited the novel as a masturbatory aid. From my previous work on Barbauld, I knew that she was a notable outlier as an early champion of the novel as a form, and I was curious to look again at her essay on the origins of novel-writing to see if I could find any subtext related to masturbation. This essay was the result, in which I argue that Barbauld was both registering contemporary anxiety about the masturbatory applications to which the novel could be put and downplaying the dangers, in her own poetry and short prose pieces notably playing with masturbatory tropes.
Finally, would you be willing to tell us a little bit about what you are working on now? The topic of this collection is so rich that I would imagine that there’s plenty here to pick up on and expand, but I know as well that your research takes you in many different directions.
Yes, thanks for asking. I have a few projects on the go at the moment. In my own research, I’m particularly excited right now about starting a new project on women and science. On my next research leave, I have plans to develop a book project that looks at how women writers from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century engage with the divide between the humanities and sciences that opened up following the Scientific Revolution. As part of this study, I will be considering how women writers (including Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, Anna Seward, Barbauld, and Hannah More) explore different scientific fields in their writings: astronomy, biology, minerology and geology, physics, and chemistry, imagining alternative models of scientific practice to the new experimental philosophy that could potentially remain more open to women and compatible with a humanities-centred education that resists the materialistic, exploitative, and extractive aspects of capitalist modernity.
Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression edited by Kathryn Ready and David Sigler is out now from Edinburgh University Press.