"All the modes of story": Genre and the Gendering of Authorship in the Year 1771

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities womens participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this offers an alternative approach based on reduction geotemporal scope productions year three cities. Working with ESTC records for 2000+ items produced these cities helped produce dataset allowed us recreate each city's and non-literary genre system, print environment, "historical present" target year. inventory became basis microhistory women's nonliterary textual production year, by city, category, genre. From project we learned London's overwhelming commercial dominance genres both (sentimental fiction, semifictional memoirs, religious elegy) "improving" (both Montagus, Macaulay, Talbot). Women other two contributed largely through salon coterie activities didactic/devotional writings. Finally, temporalized notion perplexity identifies characteristic pause action when female characters are forced place their trust men unknown character: is scenario plays out variety during from sentimental fiction pro- anti-war polemics. Our microhistorical, scaled-down feminist history version "recovery counter-representation" can accommodate multiple recovery projects, fresh perspectives, deeper inquiries into once-neglected newly available sources.