Introduction

Abstract

In the eighteenth century women throughout Europe, in increasingly unprecedented numbers, threw themselves into the project of creating an expansive world of learning and into the public exchange of ideas. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the French writer and bibliophile Fortunée Briquet could write with scholarly confidence that ‘No other century has begun with such a great number of women of letters’.¹ Indeed, in her Dictionnaire historique, littéraire et bibliographique des françaises, which compiled a list of some 580 francophone women writers from the beginnings of the French monarchy, she documented nothing short of an explosion of women into print in the last decades of the eighteenth century. We now know that the number of women writers in France trebled to over 300 in print in the revolutionary decade alone.² This feminine literary revolution was not limited to France. The number of women publishing in the German-speaking states quadrupled over the course of the eighteenth century, provoking Friedrich Schiller to write to Goethe in 1797 that he was ‘truly astounded how our women today are capable, through mere dilettantism, of creating themselves as artful writers’.³ Similar trends can be documented from England to Sweden, and as two of the contributions to this section show, in corners as far flung as Bologna and Edinburgh.⁴ The Enlightened ‘Republic of Letters’, in sum, was as much an affair of women as it was of men.