Decentering the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Feminist Literary History: New Evidence from Orlando

Recently, scholars have begun to question the centrality of the novel within the history of women's writing, and this essay participates in that rethinking. It includes search results from Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present and existing bibliographic and biographical research to demonstrate that the novel does not hold as influential a place in the history of women's writing pre-1790 as has been thought.