Women Writing Fancy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: Fancy—The Untold Story of an Aesthetic Rogue

   • Maura Smyth

   Pages 1-38

3. Defining Modernity and Fixing Fancy

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39

      PDF

   2. Threads That Go Nowhere in The Tempest and The New Atlantis

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 41-73

   3. Finding Fancy in Leviathan and Paradise Lost

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 75-112

4. Talking Back: Fanciful ‘Creatoresses’ of the Novel

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 113-113

      PDF

   2. Margaret Cavendish’s Fashioning of Fancy

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 115-150

   3. Going Undercover with Aphra Behn’s “Female Pen”

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 151-197

   4. Plotting Fancy in The New Atalantis and Fantomina

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 199-236

5. Fancy’s Afterlife

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237

      PDF

   2. Afterword: Fancy and the Tinctures, Tones, and Flavors of History

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 239-265

   3. Coda: The Persistence of Fancy

      • Maura Smyth

      Pages 267-272

6. Back Matter

   Pages 273-295

   PDF

This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten “Fancy” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth. Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity, Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the Enlightenment’s patriarchal systems and glimpse new, female-authored worlds and genres. In carving out unreal, fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture, these women writers planted Fancy—and, with it, female authorial invention—at the cornerstone of Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously, this book offers an alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity’s triumph.

• Fancy
• Women's Writing
• Eighteenth Century Literature
• Aphra Behn
• Imagination
• Leviathan
• Hobbes
• British and Irish Literature

“It offers not only an entirely new way of thinking about how creativity was conceptualized in the early modern period, but also a model of fine-grained, imaginative textual criticism that gives proper consideration to the fleeting, overlooked, and imperfect spaces in which such creativity was practiced by women.” (Natasha Simonova, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 14 (1), 2019)

• Boston, USA

  Maura Smyth

Maura Smyth is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows

Policies and ethics