Mary Beth Harris

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
When I was in undergrad, I took a wonderful course call “Novel Women," which was basically a survey of eighteenth-century women writers. We started Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and worked our way through Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, and Jane Austen. However, even before this excellent education, I had been primed for the eighteenth-century by years of dedicated watching, re-watching, and possible memorization of BBC productions of Jane Austen’s work. Yet, despite this early exposure, I set off for graduate school mistakenly believing I was a modernist and even wrote my Master’s Thesis on modernism (the denial was real and deep). However, when started my doctorate, I landed in an eighteenth-century transatlantic course and immediately rediscovered my enthusiasm for the eighteenth-century: its generic experimentation, its dynamic sprawl, and especially its women writers. I was struck over and over again by how the work of Haywood and many others felt both innovative and yet oddly familiar. I had grown up watching my mom read historical romance novels (and maybe reading some myself) and watching the aforementioned British period dramas with her and my army of Catholic aunts. I was fascinated with how these eighteenth-century women writers were creating, revising, and reconstructing genres and narratives that have so clearly stayed present in our cultural memory, while the women themselves (for the most part) had been pushed out of our cannons and classrooms until the feminist recovery projects. I wanted to be a part of this vibrant field, studying and recovering these vibrant women.
2. What are you working on right now?
My current book project argues that eighteenth-century women writers made key interventions in modern ideals of masculinity and authorship through their constructions of the gentleman in novels, and that their versions of the gentleman allowed them to co-opt literary and moral authority. By placing these women writers in dialogue with canonical representatives of the gentleman author, I show that women authors carved out a space for their literary authority in their cultural climate not by overtly opposing their male critics and society’s patriarchal structure, but by rewriting the persona of the gentleman as a figure whose popularity and desirability is dependent on women’s pens and influence. Ultimately, I hope that my work shifts how we think about the construction of masculinity in the eighteenth-century and expands how we view women writers’ relationship to their male characters, mixed-gendered audience, and male peers.
I am also working on a secondary project exploring how popular British and European genres—especially amatory fiction, romance, and secret history—were transformed in transatlantic contexts. For example, I am working on an essay on how Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) blends the genres of romance and secret history to depict sexual trauma and gender and racial privilege during the Haitian Revolution.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
One of my goals is to rethink the male characters of women writers, and to take these characters seriously in terms of their construction and influence. My current project hinges on committing to viewing the normative masculinity of the gentleman as a performance. If the gentleman’s masculinity—which seeks to present itself as internal, normative, invisible, and natural—can be viewed as a performance, then we can see the ways women were able to revise, infiltrate, and co-opt the literary privileges associated with this position. More broadly, the gentleman is still a hugely popular and desirable cultural figure, whose contours still shape western ideals of masculinity, and I think women writers played a powerful role in making that so.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
I have been revisiting two books that inspire me. The first is Kathryn King’s A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. King’s careful attention to Haywood’s identity as a professional author who was conscious and in command of her craft is detailed and wonderful. The second is Kathleen Lubey’s Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760. Not only do I love Lubey’s argument about the pervasive presence of eroticism in eighteenth-century texts and it use to both educate and titillate, but I also admire how she weaves together her readings and evidence to trace this influence across authors who are typically placed in opposition to each other, like Joseph Addison and Eliza Haywood, in creative, thorough, and unexpected ways.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
As the job market and academic culture evolves, so too do the supports women need within these structures. At last year’s ASECS, the Women’s Caucus raised enough money to cover the registration costs for independent and adjunct scholars. I found this very inspiring, and think this is the kind of work and attention we need to cultivate across academia. Now, of course, navigating a changing market and negotiating the status of independent and adjunct scholars, does not only effect women, but I think being vigilant about how to support women in these shifting markets and positions is one of the most immediate concerns we are facing.

---