Women Readers

The Romantic era in Britain witnessed the exponential expansion of women’s participation in the literary marketplace. By the middle of the 1790s, the majority of readers for all genres of literature were almost certainly women, and their social, economic, and cultural impact both as creators and as consumers of an increasingly diversified and sophisticated literary production increased in proportion to their growing numbers and their expanding networks of acquaintance, communication, and correspondence. Reading became an important exercise in community building for women, whether in relative geographical proximity or physically separated by location and circumstances. The burgeoning circulating libraries, almost a thousand of which had sprung up by 1801, offered both an endlessly fresh supply of reading materials at relatively affordable prices and an inviting social venue that might be extended further through reading circles and correspondence. Their reading offered women fresh, attractive alternatives to the dominant masculinist culture. It opened new prospects for self-definition, self-expression, and both personal and collective empowerment, not only in the domestic environment but also in the broader social, political, cultural, and economic milieu of the rapidly modernizing nation of the 1820s and beyond.