By offering a wide range of approaches to reading early modern women’s writing, including the use of archives old and new, this Special Issue advances the field of reading methodologies and the field of interpreting early modern women’s writing. While giving special attention to Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, the approaches to reading included here can energize ongoing scholarship about these and other writers. The first three essays view reading through the lenses of book history, material textuality, and performance to enrich ongoing scholarship about reading in relation to seventeenth-century book owners, theatrical staging, and song culture. The fourth and fifth articles demonstrate how a nuanced application of both computational methods and analog methods of reading can strengthen conclusions about authorial attribution and enable new interpretive directions for scholars of early modern women’s writing. The final three articles explore the challenges of remaining historically sensitive to early modern women’s achievements while using twenty-first-century creative practices to make early modern women’s writing legible to audiences beyond the academy.

What kinds of early modern readers and collectors were interested in female-authored books? And did the fact of their female authorship matter to readers? This article explores these questions by investigating sale and auction catalogs, as well as domestic manuscript private library catalogs, that indicate ownership of works by Katherine Philips in the later seventeenth century. It emerges from research conducted by the RECIRC project investigating the reception of women’s writing in the early modern period. The kinds of book owners who acquired Philips’s works, the company her books kept in their collections, and ways in which we might interpret her place on their bookshelves, are the focus. The discussion assesses her status in relation to female contemporaries (British, French, Italian, Spanish), using Philips as the anchor-point for a wider consideration of the presence of female authors in book collections of the period. (143)

“Ay, this reading of Books is a pernicious thing,” remarks Scaramouch to his master’s daughter, Elaria, in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687). In the play’s closing moments, Doctor Baliardo, Scaramouch’s master, insists that someone should “Burn all my Books, and let my Study Blaze, / Burn all to Ashes, and be sure the Wind / Scatter the vile Contagious Monstrous Lyes.” This article explores Aphra Behn’s explicit and implicit reflections on reading in this comedy, and reflects on how Scaramouch’s careful observation sheds light on the practices of reading, both in Behn’s time and in our own. Particular attention is paid to the comedy’s use of commedia dell’arte, to how that use of physical comedy is communicated to readers of the playbook, and to the opportunities of today’s editors to make available to modern readers a fuller understanding of how a Restoration text works. In the case of The Emperor of the Moon, those contexts include acknowledgement of how Black people were made use of in the annual Lord’s Mayor’s Show. Throughout this article, the work of editors for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn is drawn on, and brief discussion of other Behn works, including Abdelazer, A Discovery of New Worlds, The Dutch Lover, The Fair Jilt, The False Count, The Feign’d Curtizans, The Luckey Chance, La Montre and The Second Part of the Rover is included.

Despite the advances that recent scholars have made in analyzing Finch’s singular achievements in the literary and political contexts of her time, few attend to a significant portion of Finch’s poems—her songs—especially as they arose from the context of the late Restoration song culture. Using as a point of departure the evidence of Finch’s engagement with music in the earliest printings of her work in the 1680s and 1690s, I argue that Finch’s interest in song ran deep. Scholarly neglect of this point has contracted modern understanding of how her songs were read by her contemporaries, how twenty-first century readers might strive to read them, how song more generally informed her oeuvre, and how her participation in song culture tells us more than other surviving evidence about her life and art in relation to the entertainment milieu. To explore these varied ways of reading Finch’s songs and song itself as central to her poetic values, I analyze the contexts for reading her songs in print (as they included settings by Henry Purcell and Raphael Courteville) in the late Restoration and conclude by briefly considering the contexts for reading her songs and references to song in her earliest surviving manuscript book, compiled c. 1690–1696, initially titled “Poems on Several Subjects Written by Areta.”

This paper discusses the traditional reading of two Restoration dramatic comedies, The Debauchee (first performed 1676-7) and The Revenge (first performed 1679-80), as the works of English playwright Aphra Behn (c.1640-1689), despite their anonymous performance and publication, and their status as adaptations from earlier seventeenth-century plays. My approach combines two complementary perspectives. Firstly, I consider the evidence and circulating historical discourses relating to these works, from the plays’ debut to their current position within the peripheral canon of Behn’s work, and reflect on the cultural and political implications of a willingness to read authorship, and specifically female authorship, into the “anonymous” space each comedy provides. Secondly, I use digital stylistic methods to examine the linguistic properties of these texts. Computational stylistics uses digital tools to identify patterns and trends in language to identify correlates with genre, time period, authorial style and other literary, social and historical concepts. When comparing the stylistic properties of each play with more securely attributed works by Behn, the findings suggest a strong likeness for one play (The Revenge), but not the other (The Debauchee). I consider what this suggests for the readiness of past and present readers to see and to accept Behn’s authorship of these works as a female Restoration writer. I highlight the implications of these new findings for our reading of Restoration dramatic authorship, appropriation and collaboration more widely, and the opportunities for digital stylistics as a reading perspective in future work.

This article explores how digital systems and analyses serve as intermediaries in the process of human reading. Scholarly readers are attuned to words and narratives but also to patterns, verbal systems, textual structures and physical manifestations. In digital systems, the representation of these features for reading depends on the deep-level digital representation—the information model—that underpins the entire reading system. I argue that such models constitute readings, and that some digital models constitute scholarly readings. I will offer an account of how a particular type of scholarly modeling (exemplified by the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines) works as a reading and in support of reading, in ways that have especially close connections to scholarship on the early modern period, using examples from several prominent digital projects.

The article analyses the role of creative writing as a mode of practice‑based research capable of generating new historical knowledge about early modern women’s lives, midwifery, and domestic experience. Drawing on extensive archival scholarship and the author’s two novels, The Gossips Choice and The Midwife’s Truth set in the 1660s, it demonstrates how fictionalization enables the recovery of sensory, material, and affective dimensions absent from conventional historiography. The discussion interrogates the tension between historical accuracy and culturally shaped expectations of authenticity, and examines the representational challenges posed by childbirth, marriage, and gendered authority. This reflective article argues that historical fiction constitutes a legitimate and productive methodology for scholarly inquiry.

Our paper examines contradictory readings of early women’s lives and works that emerge from tensions between the entertainment demands of the market and the feminist aspirations of modern authors who aim to bring recognition to historical women. Such tensions create a troubling pattern of modern representations and readings that are seemingly celebratory of early modern women, yet nonetheless dismissive of their historical accomplishments. We consider both triumphs and missteps that mark those practices in recent stage and film representations of female historical figures from the past decade. These include the wives of Henry VIII, the poet Amelia Lanyer, and the literary author and philosopher Margaret Cavendish. In offering our readings of these modern productions, we aim to illuminate ways that the marketplace misreads historical women, while calling attention to exceptional readings of early women that achieve a balance between entertainment, historical accuracy, and women’s agency. 

This essay examines the commissioning of a statue to Aphra Behn in Canterbury as a case study in contemporary practices of public commemoration within a contested monumental landscape. Situating the project within a commemorative culture reshaped by the public removal of monuments deemed ethically untenable, it argues that monuments must now be understood as hermeneutically unstable texts rather than fixed commemorative statements. Drawing on archival research in seventeenth-century parish, judicial, and state records, as well as feminist monument campaigns and material culture studies, the essay explores how acts of reading, textual recovery, and public pedagogy shaped both the justification for and the form of the monument. Particular attention is paid to the fragmentary nature of Behn’s archival record and the ways in which biographical understanding is produced through absence, mediation, and conjecture. It traces the ethical, political, and economic pressures bearing upon contemporary commemorative practice, including debates over gendered erasure, commodification, and institutional risk. Ultimately, the essay proposes sculpture as a medium uniquely suited to figures like Behn, whose lives survive unevenly in the archive, and advances commemoration itself as an open-ended, readerly practice responsive to historical incompleteness and civic reinterpretation.

This introduction situates the issue’s eleven essays within Florence Boos’ career and achievements. The first section, “William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle,” features work by Owen Holland on Morris’s politics and poetics, by Heather Bozant Witcher on Christina Rossetti, and by Julie Codell on Pre-Raphelite gender representations. The second, “Victorian Poetry, Especially Women’s Poetry,” contains essays by Linda K. Hughes on Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and by Patricia Murphy on E. Nesbit. In the third section, “Working- Class Poetry and Prose,” John Goodridge describes Bristol working-class poets, Kirstie Blair explores women’s poetry from mineworker communities, Mike Sanders traces the reception of a Chartist epic, and Alisa Clapp-Itnyre explores hymnals for working-class children. In the final section, “Archival and Cultural Contexts for Literature,” Anne McKee Stapleton relates Walter Scott’s work to communities named Waverly and Kristine Swenson analyzes novels by Arabella Kenealy. An afterword by Boos completes the special issue.

Across a varied but consistent body of work, William Morris’s political writings evince a utopian commitment to imagine the world otherwise, refusing to acknowledge the present capitalist order as the ‘one natural and eternal system under which civilization must be carried on’ (Morris in Boos, ed., 2023, 124). At the same time, Morris frequently invokes images of collapse and subsequent renewal, or death and rebirth, when discussing both the destiny of the ‘lesser’ or popular arts and the long-term prospects of the social order. Several scholars (including Carole Silver, Linda C. Dowling and Karl Litzenberg) have traced this apocalyptic element in Morris’s political rhetoric to his translations of the Norse sagas during the late 1860s and 1870s, identifying his later vision of social revolution as a form of Marxist Ragnarök—the death of the sun-God Balder making way for the cataclysmic birth of a new world. Building on these insights, and reading Morris’s political rhetoric in dialogue with the solar mythology of Max Müller and the solar physics of Kelvin and Helmholtz, this essay argues that it’s possible to detect the rudiments of a distinctively socialist heliotropism in the writing of Morris and contemporaries such as Eleanor Marx and Ernest Belfort Bax. Given Boos’s frequent emphasis on the uncanny presentism, or contemporary resonance, of Morris’s political writings, the essay concludes by revisiting Martin Jay’s peremptory dismissal of the revolutionary-utopian current of socialism (for which Morris is a figurehead) in order to query anew the normative and descriptive purchase of his moderate pragmatism.

Recent scholarship highlights how periodical poetry shaped Victorian literary discourse, situating poets within debates like the Woman Question and empire. Christina Rossetti used periodicals as experimental spaces, revising poems later for volumes. “The Round Tower at Jhansi,” published in Once a Week, demonstrate her exploration of gender, agency, and imperial themes through evolving poetic forms. She challenges Victorian gender norms by reworking heteronormativity and placing domestic partnership within a military crisis. Mrs. Skene is portrayed as equally strong and courageous as her husband, rejecting passive femininity and asserting agency through dialogue and self-sacrifice. Their exchange imagines a more equal marriage, countering patriarchal expectations. Rossetti later republished the poem in 1862 and 1875, revising the poem alongside earlier works. Her periodical poetry thus functions as draft material, enabling iterative revision, identity formation, and deeper engagement with social, political, and literary discourses through evolving poetic forms.

In this paper I use the concept of transgender as a metaphor, a term that unites artists’ depictions of degendered/ungendered figures to suggest that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and Edward Burne-Jones were radically rethinking and revising gender roles and identities in the contexts of larger changing social gender identities such as the New Woman, male anxiety over women’s assertive demands and the artists’ own cross-class relationships. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s (PRB) female subjects did not look properly feminine to many Victorians. Critics attacked them as ugly, a term hiding anxiety over their atypical bodies: thick necks, broad shoulders, disregard for fashion, lower class identities, assertive actions and refusal to seductively engage viewers. Furthermore, PRB female figures were depicted in reverie, a contemplative interiority and intellect usually reserved for male subjects. Critics also attacked the perceived feminization of Edward Burne-Jones’s weak and thin male figures, considered a national threat to British masculinity by late-century degeneracy theorists.

Through case studies of works by Rossetti, Hunt and Burne-Jones and their critics, I will examine the hostility provoked by “feminine” males and “masculine” females depicted either within a domestic setting, threatening Victorian mythical idealization of the home, or within historical or classical subjects that formed the foundation of European civilization and in which figures should have exemplified strictly hegemonic gender binaries. Following art historian David Getsy’s analysis and historicizing of 19th-century painting in the context of transgender studies, I want to explore both the artists’ practices and some of the reception they received.

Both Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Browning were proposed as successors to the position of Poet Laureate after William Wordsworth died. Both poets were greatly admired by Edgar Allan Poe. And both enjoyed popular and critical admiration during their lifetimes. Yet the career arcs and achievements of these two are seldom compared. This essay redresses their understudied intersections across four categories: their early Romantic ballads, their war poems of the 1850s, their novelized long poems of 1856 and 1864, and their most famous sequence poems that rely on abba quatrains, both published in 1850.

Numerous poems by E. (Edith) Nesbit in the fin de siècle bleakly blame insufficient affection and painful separation as likely results of seemingly promising relationships.  Passion fades, affection deteriorates, and isolation looms as the poems trace a disastrous outcome for the speaker.  Deploying a variety of poetic forms, Nesbit explores the gloomy devolution of relationships that can no longer be sustained.  Each of the poems addressed in this essay builds from a connection that had already been established, rather than present a scenario where an individual desires to initiate a romance that had merely been imagined at that point.  The causes of the fracture in a couple’s bond are generally the result of a lover’s inadequate actions or troubling inactions, rather than blatant transgressions committed by the main character.  All of the poems feature a first-person speaker who unhappily traces the downward trajectory of the relationship and mourns the dissolution of a formerly fulfilling connection.  Troubling diction and grim depictions chronicle or presage the inevitable decline that harshly destroys a couple’s bond.

A key strategy in depicting the state of a couple’s relationship is Nesbit’s deployment of nature imagery.  It becomes a kind of pathetic fallacy, presenting beauty when the couple is pleasurably connected and decay when the bond is near a breakpoint or has already fallen victim to destruction.  Allusions to division, dissension, and death permeate the verses.  In effect, the poetry claims that love is simply an illusion with no guarantee that it can ever come to fruition.

What has been termed the “remarkable flowering of working-class culture and politics in Bristol” in the 1880s and 1890s saw the emergence of several talented working-class poets who were able to write to the radical political movements in which they were centrally involved while maintaining their integrity as creative and serious poets. They were John Gregory (1831-1922), shoemaker, socialist, musician and poet, John Wall (1855-1915), shoemaker, cofounder of the Bristol co-operative movement and trade unionist, and Rose E. Sharland (1882-1956), a builder’s daughter, poet, musician and journal. Well-known and respected in their own time, they have fallen into neglect over the following century. This essay forms an introduction to their poetry, considering some of its complexities and contradictions, strengths and weaknesses, It argues that their adventurousness and quality as poets merits fresh analysis, in developing a better understanding of how they contributed to the emergence of working-class and radical culture in Bristol, the principal city of the West of England, in the key transitional period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

By far the greatest number of working-class women poets in industrial professions are the factory poets, and particularly women who worked in the textile factories. In the database from the “Piston, Pen & Press” project on industrial writers, focused on Scotland and Northern England, there are only seven women poets associated with mining, out of 54 women included as writers. These seven women are dwarfed by the 137 identified male poets who worked as miners. This chapter reflects on the relation between women and industry by considering women associated with mining labor, and where they positioned themselves in relation to an industry that was increasingly male dominated as the century progressed. Considering the history of women as miner poets from the 1840s to the 1910s, I will argue for the importance of absence as well as presence, using these seven women as instances of women’s self-conscious entry into the male “collier poet” tradition.

This article compares the reception and quasi-serialization of Purgatory of Suicides in the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star with its reception in the wider Victorian periodical press. It examines the ways in which the Chartist and non-Chartist press assessed and responded to both the poetical and political challenges presented by Cooper’s poem. It begins by briefly situating Thomas Cooper within the Chartist movement, before tracing the poem’s composition in the aftermath of the mass strikes of 1842 and its subsequent publication history. It continues by considering the critical attention the poem received from non-Chartist periodicals before analyzing its reception and quasi-serialization within the Northern Star. The article concludes by examining the role played by Purgatory in Cooper’s effective expulsion from the Chartist movement in 1846 and his subsequent rehabilitation after 1848.

In popular culture, Victorian Britain has become almost unequivocally associated with impoverished children, of the Oliver-Twist trope. Indeed, by mid-century, in London alone, 30,000 destitute children roamed the streets according to Lord Ashley. While Lord Ashley himself, Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, would work to address these atrocities through his Ten Hours Act of 1833 through his Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875, the Labor movement of working people themselves perhaps best gave voice to actual conditions through the working-class literature so well examined by scholar Florence Boos. One genre that is limited but insightful is that of working-class children’s hymns and songs.

In this paper, I would like to examine three such extant hymn books written at early through late moments of the nineteenth-century Labor movement: Hymns for Factory Children, Original and Paraphrased (Leed: T. Inchbold, 1831), Pelly, John Kendrick. 1848. The Ragged-School Hymn Book (London: J. Snow); and Cinderella Songs for Children’s Meetings with Tunes: A Selection from the Labour Church Hymn and Tune Book (Manchester, Labour Church Institute, c. 1893). The former is a fiery diatribe by an anonymous writer, “a sincere friend of suffering Humanity,” and probably a working-class laborer him/herself, who speaks for the children to castigate factory owners who enslave and even kill the innocent child-workers in mills and factories. Pelly was part of the Ragged school movement to administer to the most impoverished of urban children as a scholar himself. In his hymn book, he works in a different direction, ignoring the social cause to focus his young readers on spiritual comfort. The latter stems from the Labour-Church movement of late century which created “Cinderella Clubs” to work for children’s physical relief. Though there is little scholarship on this shortly lived movement, this small, eight-page songbook is testament to its musical inspiration to the very young and poor at late-century. This essay will demonstrate three ways that adult reformers attempted to use the hymn genre to help English youth oppressed by overwork, under-nourishment, and neglect: objects to pity and fight for; subjects whose learned faith could provide a salve; and subjects who could be improved by lessons of morality. All hymn books encouraged song, with is rejuvenating possibilities. Whether through printed scores, indicating common meters to fit familiar tunes of the day, or by simply writing in common meters of song, all authors encourage singing for children, possibly the best way to provide hope for and distraction from burdened lives.

Overlooked in discussions of Walter Scott's influence in the South, Waverly, South Carolina, exemplifies his complicated and paradoxical legacy. This essay explores how an onomastic connection to Scott's Waverley novels, community building, and movements for social justice intersect in this community, Columbia's first suburb. Originally an antebellum plantation named Waverly in honor of Scott's global bestselling Waverley novels, by the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was a thriving, self-sustaining Black community that valued and promoted education, Black agency, and meaningful change. Bound to Scott's literary inheritance by name, Waverly exemplifies his paradoxical legacy, which, for some Southerners, included notions of antiquated chivalry, but, for others, meant eschewing racial oppression by imagining and building a promising future out of a turbulent past.

In 1920, the medical doctor, Arabella Kenealy, published Feminism and Sex Extinction, which warned that feminism would cause humans to degenerate to extinction. By assuming male social and professional roles, women would forfeit their ability to produce fit babies for future generations. To address this problem, Feminism and Sex-Extinction combines eugenics with the occult, a synthesis that Kenealy had explored earlier in fiction. Three of Kenealy’s novels explore how eugenically fit women are excluded from the reproductive economy because they must work. Appearing when occultism was at its height and eugenics had emerged as a dominant scientific and cultural paradigm, Woman and the Shadow (1898), Charming Renée (1900), and The Marriage Yoke (1904) posit that eugenically fit couples might transcend the limitations of unjust social structures and positivist evolution through reincarnation. Soulmates, regardless of social situation, might find each other and reproduce in a later, more evolved life.

Florence Boos reflects on more than 50 years as a member of the English department at the University of Iowa. She recalls the post-Vietnam era debates about curriculum and inclusion, the high stakes of the job market (she had received 625 prior rejections), the gradual effects of new federal laws on hiring and local autonomy, the benefits of foreign exchanges, her (at times) non-standard pedagogical choices and research topics, and her husband, Bill’s, contributions to her work. Most deeply, as the very essence of a humanities education is questioned, she affirms its crucial role in maintaining a tolerant, progressing society.