ABSTRACT

In important accounts of Mary Davys’s short epistolary work Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), Riley (1995) and Wakely (2005) suggest Davys subverts the amatory mode through its Whig, and feminist, inversion of the Tory seduction narrative. This paper’s identification of an early edition of the text, printed for J. Roberts, and attributed to the pseudonym “Dick Fisher” in 1718 complicates these accounts while providing a new vantage point from which to read the text. Importantly, new prefatory and paratextual material associated with the publication demonstrate both Davys’s commercial acumen and the porous character of the book trade in the early eighteenth century. Using this publication as a case study, this paper examines authorial agency and the complex nature of book production in the early British book trade, arguing that understanding such multiplicities is necessary for the reading of early women writers and their work.

摘要

在玛丽·戴维斯 (Mary Davys) 的短书信体作品Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady的重要记述中(1725)、Riley (1995) 和 Wakely (2005) 建议戴维斯通过其辉格党和女权主义者对保守党诱惑叙事的颠覆来颠覆性爱模式。本文对文本的早期版本进行了识别，该文本是为 J. Roberts 印刷的，并归于 1718 年笔名“Dick Fisher”，这使这些叙述变得复杂，同时提供了一个新的阅读文本的有利位置。重要的是，与该出版物相关的新序言和副文本材料展示了戴维斯的商业头脑和 18 世纪早期图书贸易的漏洞百出的特征。本文以该出版物为案例研究，考察了早期英国图书贸易中的作者机构和图书制作的复杂性，认为理解这种多样性对于早期女性作家及其作品的阅读是必要的。