Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Note on transcription Introduction Letter-writing, Community, and Virtuous Exemplarity: Elizabeth Rowe's Theatre of Happiness A Saint Everlasting: Elizabeth Rowe and Biographical Exemplarity 'The new and untrodden path': Catharine Cockburn, Philosophy and the Republic of Letters '[H]ow Obscure her Lot': Catharine Cockburn's Double Afterlife Elizabeth Carter: 'a very extraordinary Phaenomenon in the Republick of Letters' Elizabeth Carter and the Theatrum Mundi Bibliography Notes Index

Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.

MELANIE BIGOLD is a Lecturer at Cardiff University, UK. She has published work on eighteenth-century women writers, and transcribed and edited manuscripts for The Slave Trade Debate. She is currently working on a joint biography of George Ballard and Elizabeth Elstob, and leading a project on marginalia and provenance in the Cardiff Rare Books collection.