Mary Astell

For my British/Colonial women Writers class, I'm reading a biography by Ruth Perry called The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist.

An early footnote lists "[a] selection of classics of early scholarship on learned women and women writers and the conditions that shaped their lives" (p. 471, emphasis added). These "classics" go back quite a ways - historical scholarship about literary women is not a modern invention.

I'm listing the dates here and hope to get the titles of the articles/chapters/books at a later time:

• Two from the 19th century: 1861 and 1862
• Two from the second decade of the 20th century: 1913 and 1919
• Six from the third decade: 1920, 1925, three published in 1929, one in 1929-30
• Five in the fourth decade: 1931, two in 1933, 1935-36, 1936
• Four in the fifth decade: two in 1942, 1946, 1947
• Five in the sixth decade: 1954, 1956, two in 1957, 1958-59
• One in the seventh decade: a volume spanning 1965-67

Overall, Perry claims 25 *classics* re. women and creativity: where have all these classics gone?