This newsletter will be the voice for Chawton House, its Library, and the Centre for the Study of Early English Women's Writing. I would like to give some idea here of our hopes and dreams for the Library, the academic plan, and the scholarship which the Centre will make possible.

The debate we have had over a name for the newsletter reflects the terms in which we think. We began with the idea of precedent, of turning up something produced by women as much as two centuries ago or more, and then referring to that, bettering it, or extending it. The first name we thought of was The Female Spectator, which was the one Eliza Haywood gave to the periodical she ran from 1744 to 1746. The original Female Spectator had a tendency to didacticism (it belonged to the second half of Haywood's career, when in accordance with the changing spirit of the age she became less feisty and more moralistic). But it had the liveliness of all Haywood's work; it included plenty of fiction, and it aimed to increase the range of women's interests in books, human society, and the natural world.

Then we had to consider The Female Tatler. The original work appeared just before Haywood launched her career, in 1709-10. It was an almost instant response to Richard Steele's Tatler and its frequent condescension toward women. Its authors are still not unmasked, though the actuality behind its 'Mrs Crankenthorpe, a Lady that knows every thing', may quite likely have been Delarivier Manley. But our Centre is centered on Jane Austen, and a lifetime divides The Female Tatler from her birth. The connection seemed not quite close enough.

Another name that cropped up was that of The Loiterer, a periodical run by Jane Austen's brothers in their student days. It has received scholarly attention recently, not for the sake of its undergraduate creators, but for their little sister's possible contributions to it. But The Female Loiterer might give quite the wrong impression of idleness and dilettantism.

Sandy Lerner particularly liked the idea conveyed by The Female Spectator; that of women sitting on the sidelines watching intently, although they were excluded from the game. So here we are. We trust that the shade of Eliza Haywood will wish us well.

A lot of intellectual spectating is done through the medium of books. Students of Jane Austen have no difficulty locating many of the books she read, from the Bible to the original Spectator written by Addison and Steele, and from Pope and Johnson to William Cowper and Byron. These are accessible through any college or university library. It is even true today that such libraries will have the novels by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, which Austen cites in her famous defense of her fellow novelists in Northanger Abbey. Even the 'horrid' novels which Isabella Thorpe admires were reprinted in the 1960s especially because of Austen's having accorded them the doubtful honour of her attention.

Critics like Dale Spender and Joanna Russ have written about the attempt to stifle and silence women's writing. I don't think actual conspiracy theory is in order here. No one said, 'Let's suppress women's writing'! But lots of reviewers said, 'Here's another book by another woman; of course, like all the others, it isn't really very good'. Sometimes they said, as in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, 'women can't write, women can't paint'. Sometimes they simply said, 'women tend not to write as well as men'. But every book born into the literary marketplace has to struggle for survival. Most readers choose books on someone's recommendation. Most readers are diffident about their own opinions; critics with loud, confident voices wield a disproportionate amount of power. Female authorship has usually been a fairly severe handicap in whether or not any particular title gets taken up and read, becomes famous, and then finally preserved. Genres like the novel, which have become particularly connected with the idea o the female experience, have always lost status and respect.

The result has been that standard literary historians have perhaps innocently and ignorantly, but with no suspicion of their own inadequacy, written that at one period or another there was no women's writing, or no women's writing that was any good. This has happened time and again. When the printing presses were freed from restriction at the time of the English Civil War, dozens of sectarian women rushed their radical political and theological ideas into print. By the end of the century they were forgotten as if they had never existed. As they were disappearing from sight, a whole generation of women playwrights, in the wake of Aphra Behn, were providing the stage with its pressing needs: bloodthirsty tragedy and sexy comedy. Among the comic dramatists, Susanna Centlivre had a light and popular touch that kept here works in the living repertory through Austen's lifetime and well beyond, but to look at any drama syllabus today one would never imagine it.

Before Austen began to write, generation after generation of women novelists had occupied the limelight, been read, discussed and admired, but each was forgotten by the time the next generation had settled itself, and well before the books of literary history came to be written. Behn and Manley, and Haywood in her earlier phase, were too full of sex and violence for the succeeding generations. Sarah Fielding and Charlotte Lennox were eclipsed from the very beginning by their male contemporaries, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. And so on. Austen was not the first woman writer, not the first good woman writer, not the first this and not the first that; but she was the first to hold on to her place in the mainstream once she had got it. This fact alone should be enough to make people who love Austen interested in the relation between her and the female contemporaries and predecessors whom she so assiduously read.

What can you do with your interest in Mary Brunton, Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins and Rachel Hunter, all of those works Austen mentions with a mixture of respect and gleeful scorn? What about the women novelists whom, in their turn, Brunton and Hawkins and Hunter were building on or taking issue with in print? You can read them if you happen to live within reach of and have access to a research library such as Harvard, UCLA, the Bodleian or the British Library.

Or, at least, you can read many of them. Even the English copyright libraries, it turns out, which were supposed to receive from publishers a copy of every book printed in the country; really couldn't face being bothered with all those novels. There was a kind of tacit agreement between the publishers and the librarians not to offer and not to ask for copies of those kinds of books which would be least likely to interest a serious-minded academic library. This self-selecting process weeded out much fiction, especially fiction by women, and especially fiction by women who were just beginning their writing careers or who had given evidence of being 'merely' popular. So Hannah More's rigorously didactic Coelebs in Search of a Wife (the book which caused Austen to write, 'pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked') would not. Neither would one find early books of a novelist who only became successful later, nor the work of even a supremely gifted writer who failed to produce a developing career and a coherent oeuvre.

Just as it was normal outside the field of literature for a man to have a career, but unheard of for a woman to have one, so among authors a man was likely to think in career terms. A woman was expected to see her writing as a hobby (not to be put in competition with her serious duties as wife, mother, daughter or sister) or forced to see it first and foremost as a struggle for 'subsistence' or survival. Generally it proved impossible in the long run to make a living by writing; and books written in the effort to scrape together a living, like books written as a hobby were not likely to met with the respect reserved the 'literary'.

Suppose you want to read all the works of one of those literary mothers about whom Austen expressed such complicated feelings? Or to read one of Isabella Thorpe's favourites all though? Or to follow your ideas freely and unpredictably from one novel to another among the works of Austen and her female contemporaries? Although the answer would be different in every case, the search for the books themselves would likely exclude any possibility of spontaneity, of being able to follow a new interest as it springs up before you - an essential element of scholarly research. It would probably involve at least one of the following painful experiences: asking interlibrary loan for books which are then refused as being too fragile to travel; applying for grants to travel here, there and everywhere; or reading whole long novels, in tiny print, on microfilm machines (in fact, novels don't get filmed to the same extent as poems and plays, because it is known that reading on microfilm is quite unpleasant.)

Because surviving copies of these works are so widely scattered, it has not been possible to compile a complete catalogue, or a selective or annotated one a a guide to rediscovered 'lost' novels, novels worthy of some excitement. It would be highly desirable to establish a collection and catalogue with the information necessary to assist any scholar's research into early women's writing.

And so, the Chawton House Library. In this historic setting, larger and grander than anywhere Austen lived herself, but intimately familiar to her as her brother's house, and accurately reflecting the milieu of many of her characters, books are being collected to embody the female half of Jane Austen's tradition. She did not, of course, endorse divisions by gender. Henry Tilney (and Jane's actual male relatives) were, unlike John Thorpe, addicted to 'women's' reading. Anne Elliot (like Jane and Cassandra) was deeply versed in the prose and verse of male moralists. But the male side of the tradition has looked after itself; the female side needs Chawton.

Our objective is to gather together copies of as many titles by women writing in English between 1600 and 1830 as proves humanly possible. Many readers might be astonished to learn what a task that represents, and how many titles there are. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English gives details of approximately 800 women writers up to and including Jane Austen's time; that might be something like half of all the women whose writings have survived. By no means will all of these works be first editions. (It is rather sadly ironic that so many early works by women, whose writers in their lifetime struggled and staved, are now immensely valuable just because they are so rare. They lie swaddled in collections where readers can't get at them.) But a high proportion of them will be editions dating from Austen's lifetime or before. The flavor of her own reading will be recoverable by people using the Library today; as they become immersed in the press of the past - leather bindings, handmade paper, handset print, novels in several volumes, and with the long 's' and other habits of typography. Other texts in the Library will be scholarly editions, reflecting the upsurge of informed interest in early women's writing. Others still will be reprints, every one of which represents a place in the record and carries its own kind of historical interest.

Novels will predominate, but will be accompanied by plays, books of poetry, and non-fictional prose of all kinds. The male side of the tradition will be represented, though not so fully as the female. Books of criticism will be there (on Austen herself and on all kinds of relevant topics such as travel and cooking), and that indispensable genre, the reference book. This upsurge of informed interest will set its stamp on the Library's contents. The Library in turn will help to enable the next and vital wave of scholarship on the genesis of the novel as we know it today.

The Centre and the Chawton House Library are establishing a working relationship with other research libraries like the Bodleian and the Huntington. The aim is for Austen students and scholars, students and scholars of early women's writing, and every sort of reader who feels an interest in this material, to be offered the opportunity to come to Chawton and feast their historical and literary curiosity.

Isobel Grundy is Director of the Chawton House Library and Henry Marshall Tory Professor in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests center in writing by women in English from Jane Austen's generation and all those before her. She is joint author of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Yale 1990; with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements). She is now working on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, having jointly edited her Essays and Poems (Oxford 1993; with Robert Halsband), having two more editions of Montagu's writings in press (Romance Writings from Oxford and Selected Letters from Penguin) and a new biography in progress.