Political Propriety and Feminine Property: Women in the Eighteenth-Century Text Trades

Maruca shows that the author as an accountable agent emerged in England as an entity intrinsically connected to printers, publishers and other legally responsible agents within the trade. She particularly focuses on women in the print trades because their jobs led to the properly feminized eighteenth-century novel. It was the regulations governing the print trade that produced a form of morally authoritative discourse best represented by the woman author