Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century

Gender at Work continues the work of restoring to light the unjustly neglected work of four profoundly different women writers and contributes to the ongoing relationship of gender to discourse.

The opening essay compares Mary Whateley to William Shenstone and argues that gender did make a difference in their writings and discusses something of what that difference was. The three remaining essays demonstrate how the aristocratic poet Anne Finch, the middle-class playwright Mary Pix, and the discarded wife Laetitia Pilkington adapted their chosen genres to their particular ideas, feelings, and needs as women. Although their lives and genres differed radically, their work demonstrates that gender did play a role across a wide spectrum of discourse.

Gender at Work explores these differences between male and female discourse and provides useful and practical material for the theoretical debate about the role that gender played.