“Bookmaking Out of the Remains of the Dead”: George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies (1752)

Abstract

I know not how it hath happened that very many ingenious Women of this Nation, who were really possessed of a great share of learning, and have no doubt in their time been famous for it, are but little known not only unknown to the publick in general, and ^ but have ^b een passed by in silence, even by our most indefatigable Biographers themselves. 1

Reception, reputation, and early modern women's missing texts

“…The spectre of ‘known unknowns’ stalks scholars of early modern women's writing as it did Donald Rumsfeld when US Secretary of State for Defense . As Bigold observes, ‘Women's literary history … has, from its very beginnings, been constructed as a battle against a perceived set of fragmentary, incomplete, or unfinished accounts, if not excluded, forgotten, or erased ones’ . Jennifer Summit has examined how ‘the idea of loss has served as a powerful fiction that shaped the cultural place of the woman writer as well as the abstract model of a literary history that excluded her’ .…”