Chawton House Library: Women's Novels
The Divorced by Lady Charlotte Bury
1st Edition
Edited
By Kerry Parker
June 03, 2026
In this new edition of The Divorced (1837) it argues that Lady Charlotte Susan Maria Bury née Campbell (1775-1861) is one of the most influential and least understood women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century. It positions Bury’s divorce novel within the early 19thc historical contexts ...
Elizabeth Meeke’s The Abbey of Clugny: A Critical Edition
1st Edition
Edited
By Bridget Donnelly
May 06, 2026
The Abbey of Clugny itself is a formulaic novel, using misattributions of identity, disguises, and alternative identities to make up for an often-lackluster plot. While such a description is hardly a glowing endorsement of the text, one corrective a critical edition of the novel could offer is to ...
What Has Been, A Novel by Eliza Kirkham Mathews
1st Edition
Edited
By Jonathan Sadow, Elizabeth Neiman
September 23, 2025
What Has Been, originally published in 1801, is an affecting, lively, and accessible read for scholars and students of the long eighteenth century. This critical edition includes an extensive introduction, notes, and appendices. Eliza Kirkham Mathews’ portrait of a struggling female novelist ...
Rosella, or Modern Occurrences: by Mary Charlton
1st Edition
Edited
By Natalie Neill
June 21, 2023
Mary Charlton's 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and indulgence in and ridicule of sentimental tropes. Written in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) and Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), ...
Family Annals, or the Sisters: by Mary Hays
1st Edition
Edited
By Li-ching Chen
December 30, 2022
Family Annals, or the Sisters, Mary Hays's last novel, was originally published in 1817. This philosophically complex novel examines the themes of the importance of women's education, economic equality of the sexes, and general equality among all human beings. This edition of Family Annals, with a ...
The Ford Family in Ireland: by Elizabeth Ham
1st Edition
Edited
By Jennifer Martin
December 13, 2022
Elizabeth Ham's 1845 novel, The Ford Family in Ireland, provides a snapshot, based on the personal experiences of the author, of a pivotal period in that country’s history. It examines the state of Ireland following the failed rebellions of 1798 and 1803 with a focus on the uprising of the “...
Clan-Albin: A National Tale: by Christian Isobel Johnstone
1st Edition
Edited
By Juliet Shields
October 06, 2022
Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, ...
Clan-Albin: A National Tale: by Christian Isobel Johnstone
1st Edition
Edited
By Juliet Shields
October 06, 2022
Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, ...
Clan-Albin: A National Tale: by Christian Isobel Johnstone
1st Edition
Edited
By Juliet Shields
October 06, 2022
Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, ...
The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton: by Phebe Gibbes
1st Edition
Edited
By Mike Franklin
July 19, 2022
This new edition of the British epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton examines the theme of female agency, and is an excellent example of women's writing in the eighteenth-century. The relationships of the author, Phebe Gibbes, with the East ...
Celia in Search of a Husband: By a Modern Antique
1st Edition
Edited
By Caroline Franklin
June 22, 2022
This ground-breaking nineteenth-century volume is of considerable scholarly interest as an example of a femino-centric popular novel. Celia in Search of a Husband is a high-spirited and entertaining example of an anti-Jacobin novel, written at the height of the backlash against female intellectuals...
The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, by Sarah Fielding
1st Edition
Edited
By Gillian Skinner
April 12, 2022
Sarah Fielding was one of the most respected women authors of her generation and a key figure in the development of the novel. She was admired especially by Samuel Richardson, who famously commented that her ‘knowledge of the human heart’ was greater than that of her brother, the novelist Henry ...