Minerva’s Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780-1820

By Elizabeth Neiman

Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane’s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of circulating-library novels by obscure female authors. Because these novels catered to the day’s fashion for sentimental themes and Gothic romance, they were and continue to be generally dismissed as ephemera. Recently, however, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into literary history. By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minerva’s Gothics illustrates how Romantic ‘anxiety’ is better conceptualized as a mutual though not entirely equitable ‘exchange’, a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics that started in 1780, when Lane began publishing novels with some regularity. Reading Minerva novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about women’s nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature that render their novels not worth reading. By recognizing Minerva’s collaborative rather than merely derivative authorial model, a forgotten pathway is restored between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet in A Defence of Poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786833693

Elizabeth Neiman

Elizabeth A. Neiman is Assistant Professor at the University of Maine, with a joint appointment in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include the British Romantic era, women’s writing, the long-nineteenth century, and book history.

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Cover of Minerva’s Gothics

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Minerva’s Gothics

The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–1820

Elizabeth A. Neiman

© Elizabeth A. Neiman, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-367-9

eISBN 978-1-78683-369-3

The right of Elizabeth A. Neiman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Isaac Cruikshank, The Lending Library, watercolour (c.1800). By permission, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

To Dylan Dryer, and to Emma and Simon Dryer-Neiman, with love and gratitude

CONTENTS

List of Tables

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface

1   Remapping Minerva’s Influence on the Novel Market

Section One: Feminist Discernment and Minerva’s Production of Romantic Fantasy

Section Overview

2   Julies and St Preuxes: Networking ‘Lady’ Authors, 1785–1789

3   Wollstonecraft and the Revolutionary Feminist Novel: At a Crossroads with Wordsworth

Section Two: The Revolution Debate in Britain: Minerva and the Politics of Feeling

Section Overview

4   Providential Adaptations to the Romantic Fantasy, 1790–1794

5   Godwin and Providential Feeling in Things As They Are: Meeting Readers Where They Are

6   Providential Feeling at Minerva’s Zenith: What the Commoner Teaches the Nobleman

Section Three: The Forgotten Poetics of Romantic Exchange: Gothic Habits of Mind

Section Overview

7   Minerva’s Continued Influence: The Poet as Nightingale in Shelley’s 1810 Gothics

8   Reinstating Romantic Fantasy in Minerva’s ‘Late’ Novels: Romanticism and ‘Gothic’ Habits of Mind

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1: Ratio of female novelists, categorized by ‘type’, 1780–1829

Table 1.2: Ratio of male novelists, categorized by ‘type’, 1780–1829

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Differentiating between a ‘gender’ and a ‘Minerva’ effect in publication records

Fig. 1.2 Numbers of publishing female and male Minerva novelists per period, inclusively and exclusively defined

Fig. 1.3 Percentage of unidentified novelists who sign ‘by a lady’, 1780–1820

Fig. 1.4 Percentage of female novelists who sign ‘by a lady’, 1785–1820

Fig. 1.5 Percentage of novelists to publish anonymously, per period

Fig. 1.6 Author’s signature from Mary Ann Hanway’s Andrew Stuart, or the Northern Wanderer (1800)

Fig. 1.7 Numbers of all debut female novelists, 1780–1820

Fig. 1.8 The rarity of the single-novel author: a ‘Minerva effect’ dissipates in 1812–1820

Fig. 1.9 Paper sample, Minerva 1799

Fig. 1.10 Paper sample, Minerva 1820

Fig. 1.11 Paper sample, Colburn 1818

Fig. 1.12 Paper sample, Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme and Brown 1819

Fig. 1.13 Percentage of 2+ ‘persistent’ female novelists who publish from one period to the next

Fig. 1.14 Numbers of 2+ female ‘persistent’ novelists who publish in each particular period

Fig. 1.15 Persistence rate for all novelists, by percentage

Fig. 1.16 Persistence rate for all novelists, by numbers

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Because this book has been long in the making, many acknowledgements are due. Special thanks, however, are due to University of Maine colleagues and especially English department chairs Naomi Jacobs, Richard Brucher, Laura Cowan and Steven Evans. Without their advocacy, I would not have had the time, space or resources to complete this book. I also want to take the opportunity to thank Naomi Jacobs, Ben Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley and Sarah Harlan-Haughey for reading chapters from the manuscript at key points along the way, and with pleasure acknowledge other UMaine colleagues for their encouragement, most especially Jessica Miller, Mazie Hough and Susan Gardner.

My research on Minerva began some ten years prior as a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. There, Bruce Horner and Min Zhan Lu taught me to take the work of marginalized writers seriously, a pedagogical practice that influences how I approach and read Minerva novels. Now a faculty member myself, I am especially grateful to Sukanya Banerjee and Barrett Kalter for helping to supervise a project outside their areas of expertise and when still on the tenure track. The dissertation was, as it turns out, just a starting point for this book. I owe special thanks to my students at the University of Maine. Their creativity and dedication helped me to make progress on questions important to my research through a series of advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses. I have also benefited enormously from presenting my work at conferences in both North America and the UK. The scholarship of and more informal exchanges with Anthony Mandal, Jennie Batchelor, Edward Jacobs, Yael Shapira, Christina Morin, Hannah Doherty Hudson and Daniel Mangiavellano imprint this book. I am particularly grateful to Anthony Mandal for his thoughtful and thorough reading of my manuscript at a critical point in its development, and for offering his journal, Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, for a forthcoming special issue on the Minerva Press (2019). Thanks also to April London for providing a forum for annotations on novels not featured in this book with the invitation to submit to The Cambridge Companion Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1660–1820, and to Mark Towsey, whose AHRC-funded research colloquia ‘Libraries in the Atlantic World’ (2014–15) helped me to think more expansively about my project at an early stage in its inception.

A Chawton House Library fellowship was instrumental to my research and I extend a warm thanks to librarian Derren Bevin for allowing me free range of the stacks. Thanks also to Derren for his willingness at the eleventh hour to retake photos for a higher resolution print than I had available. Acknowledgement is also due to special collections librarians at the New York Society Library and the University of Minnesota library for providing me with a comfortable place to sit and read.

As a version of the second half of Chapter 1 was published in European Romantic Review in September 2015, thanks to Taylor & Francis for permission to reprint. I am particularly grateful to ERR editors Regina Hewitt and the late Diane Long Hoeveler for agreeing to send this article out for a second round of reviews after it had been rejected on a third read, following a mixed review. This extended review process was instrumental and a starting point for the book as it introduced me to scholarship of which I was unaware, and pushed me to clarify and refine my central argument.

With keen awareness of the potential complications that arise when looking to publish a monograph, especially perhaps a first one, I thank Sarah Lewis, Head of Commissioning at the University of Wales Press, for her encouragement of the project and for keeping me up to date with the manuscript’s process in both peer review and while in press. I am also thankful to copy-editor Henry Maas for his attentive eye and good humour.

Work on this book has been accompanied by profound changes in my life. Most notably, I became a mother (first, at the dissertation stage, and then nearly nine years later, while completing my manuscript), while also losing my beloved mother, Judy Neiman, to pancreatic cancer. I owe special thanks to family members and friends not only for their support but also, in many cases, for their input on the project. I would probably have shied from statistical analysis but for the guidance of my twin sister, biologist Maurine Neiman. My dear friend Emily Fridlund was from the first a champion of this project as well as an enthusiastic reader. Special thanks to my father, Bill Neiman, for his love, encouragement and support. I could not, finally, have completed this book without the critical acumen of Dylan Dryer, who over the past ten years proved time and again to be a never-failing, never-flagging reader and editor.

Preface

William Lane’s popular London press, Minerva, published an unprecedented number of new novels between 1790 and 1820 and brought dozens of writers – female and male, provincial and urban, English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish – into the burgeoning marketplace.¹ Lane, a savvy businessman who capitalized on the fashion for novels, advertised for new manuscripts and sold his stock as circulating-library collections to shopkeepers across the nation.² Because these novels catered to the day’s fashion (e.g. gothic romances, sentimental novels, tales of the times), they were and still are generally dismissed as ephemera. Yet recently, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into Romantic-era literary history.³ In particular, Minerva has been said to elicit Romantic ‘anxiety’, Lucy Newlyn’s term for the period response to prolific print culture that was to redefine literature as imaginative, individually authored and, above all, distinct from all other forms of writing.⁴ ‘Anxiety’ has helpfully illuminated Minerva’s role in inciting Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature; however, remaining focused on canonical Romanticism, it reveals nothing new about Minerva novels. As we shall see, Romantic anxiety is more accurately understood as a mutual though not entirely equitable ‘exchange’, a dynamic interrelationship among Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics. Minerva’s admittedly derivative themes and otherwise borrowed material (from character types to fashionable terms like ‘poetical’ and ‘the sublime’) draw its authors into a shared circuit of production that includes writers who may now be regarded as canonical, but who were at the time competitors for a rapidly expanding readership.

By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minerva’s Gothics adds to what we know about the market’s impact on Romantic-era redefinitions of authorship in two ways. First, while the term ‘exchange’ allows us to maintain the Press’s reputation for formulaic or easily exchangeable novels (which often literally exchanged hands), it also allows us to recognize that Minerva novelists react creatively to an increasingly stratified literary market by borrowing the gendered rhetoric of ‘prolific’ print culture. Such rhetoric includes references to the sublime and to original genius as well as to circulating-library novels themselves, which their critics commonly treat as a feminized form, irrespective of the gender of the author.⁵ Thanks to this critical reception, Minerva novels become the feminized doubles of the ethos of genius: their authors, novel readers-turned-writers, and their works, the practically self-reproducing circulating-library novel. By repurposing these ‘doubles’, however, Minerva novelists fashion an actively collaborative model of authorship that enables them to enter debates over woman’s nature, the social order and the literary market.⁶ Second, it will be seen that Minerva’s authorial model surfaces in Romantic poetics – and in particular, in Percy Shelley’s portrayal of the poet in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821). Even as Shelley continues the cultural work (begun most prominently by Wordsworth in his 1800/1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads) of elevating the poet above all other writers, his vision of the ideal poet (impassioned, inspired, prophetic) reflects a profoundly social understanding of how the poet comes to compose his verse.

Minerva’s Gothics restores a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet. At the height of Minerva’s popularity, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Wordsworth all treat the novel as a test-case for examining the relationship between society and individual habits of mind, either by writing their own novels (Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, 1798; Godwin’s Things As They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794) – or, in Wordsworth’s case, by pointedly not writing one. All three writers investigate the limits of popular print culture and in particular its effects on naïve, feminine readers. If each is preoccupied with reaching a wide readership, each also treats formulaic novels as part of a larger, systemic problem: that education, comprehensively defined, creates servile minds. Minerva novelists provide a more democratic view of how literary conventions work on the minds of everyday writers and readers. This reassessment of Minerva novels shows that Romantic anxiety both underwrites and effaces a surprisingly modern assessment of the composing process, or what happens when writers sit down to write. When Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Wordsworth highlight the mutually constituent relationships among literary conventions, personal dispositions, and larger political and cultural formations, they too portray authorial invention as a social encounter between authors and a shared text. Yet unlike their colleagues at the Minerva Press, they envisage a select few writers capable of transcending the constraints of the market. Their vision helps create the conditions for what will eventually become the dominant aesthetic associated with canonical Romanticism: the poet’s turn inwards, as if free from the market, politics and all conventional social constraints.⁷

Newlyn and others who attend to the economics of the literary market have complicated the simplistic, if durable, portrait of the Romantic artist as ‘original genius’.⁸ As William St Clair explains:

The rhetoric of romanticism, mainly devised and developed in Victorian times, stressed the uniqueness and autonomy of the ‘creative’ author … In practice, however, most authors were obliged to operate within a commercial system in which they, their advisors, and their publishers attempted to judge what the market wanted and how best to supply it.⁹

While Michael Gamer agrees with St Clair that Romantic writers interacted with the market, he restores emphasis on authors, demonstrating that they recognized the necessary collaborations required to forge an image and cultivate success.¹⁰ Minerva’s Gothics focuses on an even subtler (because not always intentional) site of collaboration between author and text: the genre expectations that produce authorial agency, even as they constrain it. This approach illuminates Anis Bawarshi’s explanation that ‘genre is what it allows us to do, the potential that makes the actual possible.’¹¹ Minerva novelists – marginalized by a feminizing discourse and, more often than not, women themselves – are uniquely situated to feel the constraints of their genre: the circulating-library novel. Rather than pretend to rise above these constraints, these novelists acknowledge them, if sometimes ruefully, showing that they recognize their labour as a collaborative process and that change can only be engendered over time.

After all, not all Romantic-era writers bought into what Clifford Siskin calls the ‘Romantic myth of culture, a myth which assigns to a set of primary artistic texts, and their creators, the power of psychologically transcending the everyday.’¹² Minerva’s Gothics shows that period authors, canonized and marginalized alike, treat the popular novel as a genre that compels the writer to adhere to convention. When Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft and Godwin describe popular literature as perpetuating a conservative worldview, they partially realize the poststructuralist position that writers both inscribe and are inscribed by social texts. This realization is only partial, however, because they still presume that some writers are capable of transcending their socio-political context to reshape the possible. ‘Prolific’ print culture inspires these first-generation Romantics to apply empiricism, or attention to sensation and association, to the writing experience. Merging Romantic-style interiority with a neo-classicist emphasis on authorial imitation, this trio helps to precipitate the Romantic theories of the mind that prefigure ‘inspiration’ as spontaneous and self-originating.¹³ By contrast, reading Minerva novels as exchangeable (but not interchangeable) nodes in a network illustrates that many period novelists do not see any necessary contradiction between imagination and freedom or imitation and constraint. Their novels can help us see formulaic or ‘reproductive’ novels differently, and thereby expand what we see about authorship, then and now.¹⁴

Like other scholars who examine the market’s influence on Romantic definitions of authorship, Wordsworth’s well-documented anxiety is a touchstone of my discussion.¹⁵ Building in particular on Gamer’s description of Wordsworth’s ‘offensive’ (and not merely ‘defensive’) stance in the 1800/1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and how this stance reflects Wordsworth’s debt to the popular market,¹⁶ I contend that when Wordsworth presents the idealized Poet as subject to his own self-made ‘habits of mind’ in 1800, he inverts the novel-reader-turned-writer as ‘she’ is commonly imagined by period critics (young, female, recycling the same tired fantasies). This imagined author is a ‘stamp’, merely reproducing the shopworn conventions that, having filled her imagination, she mistakes as her own.¹⁷ By contrast, the Poet’s capacity to formulate his own habits of mind steels him against the sensationalized, false feelings of popular literature – a point of contrast that Wordsworth sharpens in 1802 when he elevates the Poet to almost superhuman heights (‘the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time’¹⁸). This idealized Poet’s capacity to feel and think anew becomes a central feature of canonical Romanticism, just as its dark double, the hapless novel reader-turned-writer, becomes a metonym for the popular print market.

Wollstonecraft and Godwin will be shown to adopt a similar point of view as Wordsworth in their respective 1790s novels, but they do not suggest, as does Wordsworth himself, that they are free from conventional constraints on authorial innovation. Both conclude that popular conventions delimit to an important degree what the responsible writer should say, but their reasons for this conclusion differ. Wollstonecraft delimits her vision in Wrongs to convince her compatriots that the elite female author, despite her ‘herculean’ capacity to rise above convention,¹⁹ is still beleaguered by the emotions and desires that structure women’s popular novels. In Wrongs, Maria cannot help but desire Darnford, who envisages her as angelic as the ‘highly-finished Minervas’ of the popular press²⁰ – until, that is, she has sex with him and he tires of her. When Godwin elevates Wrongs above most novels in 1799, he adopts what becomes the standard Romantic view: ‘it is the refuge of barren authors only, to crowd their fictions with … events.’²¹ Yet back in 1794, a tense year for revolutionary writers, Godwin appreciated the potential of formulaic conventions for meeting readers where they are. In Things As They Are, Godwin revises the Enlightenment view that truth is disseminated from elite authors downwards, instead demonstrating that authors who hope to influence readers must first prepare themselves to be influenced by the feelings and habits of mind they strive to amend. Still, even as Godwin acknowledges the power of a shared social text, like Wollstonecraft he implies that were he not so mindful of social reform he would pursue his own independent vision.

Together, these first-generation Romantics anticipate Shelley’s mature poetics in ‘Defence’ as well as what I am calling a forgotten poetics of Romantic exchange. Shelley, though influenced by Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s politics and Wordsworth’s poetics, has a more dialogic perspective than his mentors on the poetics of popular fiction. In St. Irvyne (1811), Shelley recalls a key word from Wordsworth’s 1800/1802 Preface when subjecting gothic hero and sentimental heroine alike to the ‘mechanical’ feelings that engender conventional plots like the heroine’s seduction (Eloise succumbs to the villain after his image enters her mind with ‘almost mechanical force’, troubling her with unwanted feelings²²). Wollstonecraft and Godwin also subject their protagonists to conventional feelings, but only Shelley does so without suggesting that he delimits his vision to reach period readers. Since Shelley himself read and wrote gothic novels when young, he is better able to see that all writers are automatically influenced by the feelings, desires and values that inscribe popular conventions. However, Shelley’s eulogizing of the Poet-figure in ‘Defence’ was to undercut this initially progressive position, effacing his debt to the novel market and solidifying period distinctions between the freedom of poetic genius and the servility of writing for one’s own day and age.

This book’s scope and content challenges an anachronism that still permeates studies of the Romantic era. If Minerva novels helped to precipitate the modern division between high and low literature, they circulated prior to this division and should therefore be read alongside other Romantic-era texts. Mid- to late eighteenth-century writers published in multiple genres, making boundaries between philosophical and literary texts more porous than they eventually became.²³ We know that Romantic-era writers often attached competing meanings to the same culturally legible terms and that novels in particular were used as a vehicle for political and philosophical debate (e.g. the ‘war of ideas’ waged through Jacobin and anti-Jacobin novels²⁴). Minerva novelists, by contrast, are not usually imagined to have actively participated in these debates, and their novels are frequently portrayed as merely reflecting the day’s popular tastes and conservative ideologies.²⁵ That portrayal flattens terms that many Minerva novelists would have contested. Minerva’s Gothics acknowledges both the formulaic quality of Minerva’s ‘borrowed material’ and the special quality of this material for marginalized writers. While no one would dispute that Minerva’s most popular conventions and fashionable tropes are literary hand-me-downs, this is not all that they are. Minerva’s derivative themes are an accidental inheritance that furnishes writers with the language to respond to Romantic-era debates, most notably by refashioning Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature into a collective authorial model.

This authorial model can be hard to see, for despite their numbers, Minerva novelists do not appear to have participated in the sort of close authorial communities honoured as ‘circles’ in our literary journals, library collections and databases (e.g. ‘The Wordsworth Circle’, ‘Shelley and his Circle’, ‘Romantic Circles’). Moreover, they often worked quickly and in acute financial distress, as their letters to the Royal Literary Fund suggest.²⁶ Minerva’s authorial model is generic, by which I mean that these writers de-emphasize personality by linking their work to the codes and conventions of formula (and indeed, many publish anonymously). When Minerva novelists borrow popular literary conventions, however, they connect their writings to seminal literary and philosophical texts. They also forge connections among each other, creating a collective (or ‘generic’) model of authorship that is not simply derivative. These novelists are connecting with each other over space and time via a market-driven system of exchange, the circulating-library novel. If their influence on each other is not as obvious and accessible as the personal intertextual exchanges attributed to canonized poets and their critics (such as Shelley’s parody of Peter Bell), Minerva authors communicate with each other through constant, often subtle modifications on and infractions of these popular formulas. These modifications come into view when the novels are read collectively and with a definition of intertextuality that is flexible enough to include a shared social text, or the popular turns of phrase and formulaic conventions that were readily available to practically any novelist.

A circle is exclusive – would-be participants are not always welcome. By contrast, Minerva’s authorial community, which is constituted by a set of conventions with permeable boundaries, creates an inclusive network. That popular conventions might belong to everybody makes Romantics ‘anxious’, for reasons ranging from the political (e.g. the politics of who disseminates information) to the aesthetic (e.g. the politics of taste). Romantic exchange, and thus the shared circuit of production that connect Minerva novelists to now canonical authors, is best measured by analysing writers’ use of popular conventions, a practice that restores Minerva novels’ conversations with each other and with texts long assumed to be out of their class. It is hardly surprising that Minerva novelists, excluded from more traditional authorial circles, appear more cognizant of this exchange than the first-generation canonical authors featured in the study. To illustrate that Romantic exchange occurs at the level of convention, and that Minerva’s influence extends beyond the novel market proper to the very authors most concerned about prolific print culture, I pair literary analysis with statistical analysis of publishing records for all British novels published between 1780 and 1829 (my dataset is compiled from James Raven and Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles and includes updates published in the Reports section of Romantic Textualities). I also examine material novels for paper quality and advertisements.²⁷ This multi-faceted approach allows me to quantify my argument about Minerva’s authorial model, as Minerva novelists continue to publish well into the 1800s and 1810s, after the Press had been ‘branded’ a factory for cheap, formulaic novels.²⁸

Many Minerva novelists publish only occasionally with Lane’s famously prolific press. Of those Minerva novelists now identified either fully or by surname, most (78 per cent) publish more than one novel, and of these, most (73 per cent) publish with both Minerva and other presses, a point that has gone unmentioned in scholarship on Minerva and its novels. The publishing records allow a careful exploration of Minerva’s shifting relationship to the novel market over the course of its growing influence through the mid-1790s, as well as later in the 1800s and 1810s, when many authors who debuted with Minerva are still publishing, although often with other presses. It will be confirmed that Minerva is indeed important for female authors, but certain myths will be dispelled, such as Minerva’s association with the signature ‘by a lady’. Because the focus throughout is Minerva novelists’ creative reuse of popular conventions and the ways that these conventions resurface in Romantic politics and poetics, the aim is not to uncover biographical information about specific authors.²⁹ Rather, novels are discussed in order to illuminate suggestive patterns among clusters of novelists – those still unidentified, those who publish several novels within a brief window of time, and the long-term or career novelists who publish frequently over Minerva’s run, sometimes exclusively with Minerva but more often in combination with other presses.

By pairing the macroscopic lens of data analysis with the microscopic lens of literary analysis, Chapter 1 rereads Minerva’s rise, zenith and decline, and provides a way to reassess its novels’ contribution to and erasure from literary history.³⁰ Each of the book’s three sections analyses Minerva novels in light of now canonical texts that influence debates in Britain over woman’s nature (Section One), the French Revolution and its impact on the British social order (Section Two) and Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature (Section Three). Each section additionally demonstrates that these debates are inflected by the circulating-library novel’s impact on the literary market and, in particular, on changing relations among readers, writers and critics. Sections consist of an introductory argument and two or three consecutive chapters, each of which is a self-contained argument that gains additional meaning when read in relation to the entire section. These chapters are arranged chronologically, so as to chart Minerva’s early rise, zenith and eventual decline, permitting a focus on how a popular genre changes over time.

Early Minerva novels are best characterized as ‘sentimental’, a subgenre that by Minerva’s zenith, roughly 1795–1802, takes on a notably ‘providential’ tone. Reflecting the rise of counter-revolutionary sentiment in Britain, providential novels use fatalistic language to show that nobility is born, not bred. Minerva’s providential novels recycle the gothic conventions popularized by Radcliffe (e.g. persecuted heroines, cases of mistaken identity, mysterious manuscripts), substantiating the Press’s reputation for trade gothics. Yet, contrary to critics’ representations of Minerva authors as copyists of The Mysteries of Udolpho, most deviate from Radcliffe’s model in important ways.³¹ My title phrase, ‘Minerva’s Gothics’, acknowledges Minerva’s reputation (then and now) for the gothic and the way that this critical signposting reflects emergent distinctions between high and low literature. Attesting to the power of this signposting, I treat the gothic as a heuristic for Minerva’s network as it operates in use – as ‘mechanical’ habits of mind that novelists both adapt to and alter over time. By the late 1800s and 1810s, Minerva’s gothics are generic hybrids that read as microcosms of the larger network, summoning conventions popular through the Press’s run.

Section One considers how