This book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made the British literary heritage a source of national pride. Women critics understood the contested nature of aesthetics and the public implications of aesthetic values on questions such as morality, both public and private, the nation's cultural heritage, even the essential qualities of Britishness itself.

Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: "FORMS SCIENTIFIC AND ESTABLISHED" - THE CRITICAL PREFACE, THE CANON, AND THE WOMAN CRITIC The British Common Reader: Critical Prefaces by Anna Letitia Barbauld Renouncing the Forms: The Case of Elizabeth Inchbald PART II: "FEARFUL ASCENDENCY" - WOMEN PERIODICAL LITERARY REVIEWERS "The first of a new genus-": Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and The Analytical Review Periodicals and Middle-Class Dissent: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody at the Monthly Review The Next Generation: Harriet Martineau's Literary Reviews for the Monthly Repository Notes Bibliography Index

MARY A. WATERS is Assistant Professor at Wichita State University, Kansas, USA. Her previous publications include articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Nineteenth-Century Studies.