Class Description

This course will spread out over the course of the year. Each month introduces a new book that you may not have heard of but that your heroine might well have read! We’ll be looking at some famed reads and some that are less well-known today in order to explore what women were writing and reading in the Georgian and Regency Periods.

January 2026: Fantomina –Eliza Haywood (1725)
This month, we’ll be looking at the female tradition of amatory fiction and thinking about the role it played in the rise of the novel.

February 2026: An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs T C Phillips –Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748-9)
This month, we’ll be diving into the popular eighteenth genre of the salacious memoir, focusing on one of the most famous. We’ll be looking at what the text reveals about life for women in the period but also explore what these memoirs reveal about reading habits through the century.

March 2026: Millenium Hall –Sarah Scott (1762)
This month, we’re reading a mid-eighteenth century, Utopian novel about a community of women. We’ll be looking at the way the book represents women’s lives and imagines female community.

April 2026: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral –Phillis Wheatley (1773)
This month, we’re reading the first poetry collection by a Black woman published in England. We’ll be thinking about the text in the larger context of abolition and of Black writing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

May 2026: Letters on the Improvement of the Mind –Hester Chapone (1774)
This month, we’ll be looking at conduct books. We’re reading Hester Chapone’s collection, thinking about the ways in which it, perhaps, defies our expectations of the conduct book (it was, after all, approved by Mary Wollstonecraft).

June 2026: The Recess, or a Tale of other Times–Sophia Lee (1783-5)
We’ll be reading this lesser known text by educator Sophia Lee. It’s an early example of historical fiction but more precisely ‘alt-history’. Lee reimagines the past by giving Mary, Queen of Scots two daughters. We’ll be exploring the book and the idea of women as historians in the eighteenth century more broadly.

July 2026: Selected poems from Anna Laetitia Barbauld
This month, I’ll provide a pack of selected poems by author Anna Laetitia Barbauld. She was an educator, critic, theologian, poet and more. We’ll be exploring some of her activist poetry and thinking about her in the context of Protestant Dissent at the time.

August 2026: Romance of the Forest –Ann Radcliffe (1792)
We’ve all heard of Ann Radcliffe, the queen of Gothic fiction! I’ll be sharing my favourite Radcliffe this month and we’ll be exploring what the early Gothic actually looked like. We’ll also be diving into the book and thinking about how women writers used the Gothic to explore all sorts of contemporary issues.

September 2026: The Emigrants –Charlotte Smith (1793)
Charlotte Smith was a poet and author who was both famous and influential at the time. We’ll be looking at her poem The Emigrants which reflects on the French Revolution and the fate of Emigres. We’ll be looking at this in the wider context of women writing their experience of or attitude towards the French Revolution.

October 2026: Letters written during a short residence in Sweden –Mary Wollstonecraft (1796)
Wollstonecraft is perhaps most famous today for her Vindications of the Rights of Woman. We’ll be looking at some aspects of her directly political and feminist work, but we’re going to be reading her Letters, which give an insight into her life and thought. We’ll also be thinking about these letters in relation to wider trends of women’s travel writing in the eighteenth century.

November 2026: Castle Rackrent –Maria Edgeworth (1800)
This month, we’ll be looking at the satirical novel Castle Rackrent. We’ll be thinking about the Irish context for Edgeworth’s writing and we’ll think about women’s satirical writing.

December 2026: Zofloya, or The Moor –Charlotte Dacre (1806)
For our final read, we’ll be heading back to the Gothic and looking at some of the more scandalous women’s writing of the period.