Publishers

During the Romantic period, the rapid growth of print meant that women who wanted to publish their writing had a number of options, both in terms of how to publish and with whom. In the English-speaking world, the book trade was primarily centered in London, although the period saw the growth of a substantial publishing industry in Edinburgh (Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850. Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2007, 152), and minor publishers also operated out of provincial towns; Dublin and Philadelphia were home to lively reprint trades but did not substantially contribute to the publication of new works by women. Within London, there were hundreds of different publishing firms active, operating at different scales and with different specializations. In securing a publisher, authors were faced with the question of the best financial arrangement: they could sell their copyright outright, fund publication through subscription, take on the financial risk themselves by self-publishing, or come to profit-sharing arrangements (see Feldman, Keats-Shelley Journal 46:148–76, 1997; Pink, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40:51–68, 2006; Sutherland, The Review of English Studies 64 (263): 105–26, 2013). About 10% of London book trade firms in the eighteenth century were run by women (see McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730. Clarendon Press, Oxford; New York, 1998; Grundy, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V: 1695–1830. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009; Barker, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities. Routledge, New York, 2014), but they are outside of the scope of this entry. Major publishers – including Thomas Hookham, the Minerva Press, Longmans, Robinsons, Cadell and Davies, Joseph Johnson, John Murray, and Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley – played pivotal roles in the careers of prominent women writers; moreover, these firms published a substantial number of works by women overall.