Blind Woman on the Rampage

Abstract

What counts as a good source for biographical information? This is a question that I want to address as it is, for me, the burning question in both the recovery project of eighteenth-century women writers and the exploration of the experience of disability in the eighteenth century, since we have few objective records of either which would ‘count’ for traditional biographers. It is also a question to which Bill Overton gave a bold lead that I intend to follow in this chapter.

The author, being partially sighted, cannot read paper copies of books, so references are to pdf copies, which can be read with text-to-voice, most of which do not have page numbers. Thus, in this chapter, unless the page number has been located by a sighted person, the electronic version will be cited. I have chosen this practice as a statement of intent since, as a partially sighted scholar, I cannot easily work with texts that cannot be translated by text-to-voice.