Discussions about the development of the novel often jump directly from
the 1740s, when Richardson and Fielding were particularly successful, to
the 1770's, when women supposedly entered the marketplace in greater
numbers. The little scholarship that focuses on the British novel in the
1750s has primarily addressed male output and concluded that the genre
was faltering and in danger of extinction. Masters of the Marketplace is
the first volume specifically to assess the importance of the 1750s in
literary history and to argue that women novelists engaged in critical
renovation of the novel as a genre and reclaimed it as a proto-feminist
project. This book highlights how these women controlled their literary
circumstances, mining their prospects and nimbly responding to the
changing literary marketplace, the emergent domestic ideals, varied
reader responses, shifting notions of genre, and new developments in
epistemology. Their texts spoke in more pointed ways to societal
inadequacies, and their use of amatory and sentimental fiction, two
categories often ridiculed, in fact produced transgressive results. Thus
they were masters of, rather than mistresses to, a rapidly changing
publishing world. Indeed, in the 1750s women and men's novel output was
nearly equal. The most prolific women authors of this decade, Sarah
Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Sarah Scott, were among the ten top
producers of new fiction. Thus, women novelists had arrived at a crucial
intersection in literary history when their interest in fostering public
personae merged with a more amenable marketplace. This collection of
essays shows how women took advantage of the brief window of opportunity
and made an essential contribution to literary history.
