Authorship, commerce, and gender in early eighteenth-century England - Catherine Ingrassia

Speculative investment and the popular novel can be seen as analogous in the early eighteenth century in offering new forms of 'paper credit'; and in both, women - who invested enthusiastically in financial schemes, and were significant producers and consumers of novels - played an essential role. Examining women's participation in the South Sea Bubble and the representations of investors and stockjobbers as 'feminized', Catherine Ingrassia discusses the connection between the cultural resistance to speculative finance and hostility to the similarly 'feminized' professional writers that Alexander Pope depicts in The Dunciad. Focusing on Eliza Haywood, and also on her male contemporaries Pope and Samuel Richardson, Ingrassia goes on to illustrate how new financial and fictional models offered important models for women's social, sexual, and economic interaction.

"...an interesting and worthwhile book."
Laura L. Runge, Modern Philology

"Among the many pleasure's of Ingrassia's book is its clear and forceful style; this is a truly readable book as well as a provocative one."
The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual

"Catherine Ingrassia's book will probably be more satisfying to those readers who equate the 'culture' of its title with popular print representation. I offer this review as an extremely satisfied reader who sees Commerce and Gender as one more good reason why it is productive, in attempting to reconstruct early modern history, to make this equation...Ingrassia enables our thinking of gender as a term central to how the English understood and represented economic and social changes."
Albion