Articles in Journals & Books

Exploring the Lives of Women 1558-1837
 
My contribution was a chapter on Peg Plunkett and her friends, examining the collaborative networks formed by eighteenth-century prostitutes which enabled them to support each other through good times and bad. I reflected on the similar support my network at WSG had provided (although without the sexual element!).
Exploring the Lives of Women 1558-1837 was written by members of the Women's Studies Group to celebrate our 30th Anniversary.The group was formed to promote research into any aspect of women’s lives as experienced or depicted within this period. The depth, range and creativity of the essays in this book reflect the myriad interests of its members.

The collection explores themes relating to female power and physical strength; infertility, motherhood, sexuality and exploitation; creativity and celebrity; marriage and female friendship. It draws upon a wide range of primary materials to explore diverse representations of women: illuminating accounts of real women’s lives appear alongside fictional portrayals and ideological constructions of femininity. In exploring women’s negotiations with patriarchal control, this book demonstrates how the lived experience of women did not always correspond to prescribed social and gendered norms, revealing the rich complexity of their lives.
Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations during the long C18th Century was another collaboration with the Women's Studies Group . In this one, I contributed a chapter on the friendships between Emma Hamilton and the Queen of Naples.



Fame & Fortune. Sir John Hill and London Life in the 1750s (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores the life of Sir john Hill (1714-1775), a prolific contributor to Georgian England's literature, medicine and science. He became a household name throughout Britain and Europe in 1750s. 

I have contributed a chapter on 'John Hill and his Erotic Satires' to this edition.

I first came across Hillm when I was working on my first book Mighty Lewd Books. The Development of Pornography in C18th England. Hill had written some splendid satires on reproduction after being spurned by the Royal Society. 









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Early articles include the following:

  • 'Bodily Anxieties in Enlightenment Sex Literature', Voltaire Studies in History of Ideas;Travel Writing; History of the Book; Enlightenment and Antiquity. Vol. I 2005
  • Various articles for The Encyclopaedia of Erotic Literature (Fitzroy Dearborn, including on virginity, gender, sex manuals & various erotic books
  •  ‘Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography’ in Women’s Writing, Summer 2004
  •  ‘Initiation, Defloration and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’ in Patsy Fowler and Alan Jackson (ed.), This Launch into the Wide World: Essays on Fanny Hill (N.Y. AMS Press, 2003) 
  •  ‘Gender & Power in the Early Modern Period’ and ‘The Legal Status of Women’ in Readers Guide to British History (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2003).
  • 'Medicine, the Body and the Botanical Metaphor in Erotica’ in Kurt Bayertz & Roy Porter (eds.), From Physico-Theology to Bio-Technology (editions Rodopi B. V., Amsterdam – Atlanta, 1998).New paragraph
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