Nobody's Story

Nobody's Story is a ground-breaking exploration of the careers of five influential women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The `nobodies' of her title are not ignored, silenced, erased, or anonymous women. Instead, they are literal nobodies: the abstractions of authorial personae, printed books, scandalous allegories, intellectual property rights, literary reputation, debts and obligations, and fictional characters. These are the exchangeable tokens of modern authorship that lent new cultural power to the increasing number of women writers during the eighteenth century. Women writers, Gallagher discovers, invented and popularized numerous ingenious similarities between their gender and their occupation. Far from creating only minor variations on an essentially masculine figure, they delineated crucial features of `the author' for the period in general by emphasizing their trials and triumphs in the market place.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) and Delarivier Manley (1663-1724) became popular and notorious by likening their authorship to the perceived `nothingness' of female sexuality and deceptions of scandalous rumour-mongering. This preoccupation with absence and misrepresentation, Gallagher argues, was imported into the novel, the new genre that encouraged identification with `nobodies' - with fictional characters understood to have no individual embodied referents in the world. In studies of the economic relations, authorial personae, and fictional techniques of Charlotte Lennox (1729-1804), Frances Burney (1752-1840), and Maria Edgeworth (1768?-1849), the book details the evolving connection between the development of the novel and the growing prestige of the female author.