“The Very Roads of Literature”: Women Editors of Nineteenth-Century British Literary Annuals

Abstract

Perspectives drawn from bibliographical analyses of the text as a product of human work must necessarily view the product from the enabling source and examine sociological environments that allow texts to circulate. Yet the history of scholarship on authorship, reading, and publishing is relatively new.1 We emphasize our debt to such scholarship, as we explore methods of textual interpretation that view publishing history as part of the continuous link between material text and reader. The burgeoning middle-class consumerism that drove the nineteenth-century literary marketplace created early opportunities for women through the production of literary annuals and periodicals, and this moment in literary history provides an opportunity to examine gender politics informing women writers, editors, and texts in this moment of literary history.