Interests

Jennie Batchelor joined the School of English in 2004 after spending two years as the Chawton Post-doctoral Fellow in Women's Writing at Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton. She works on and publishes in the long eighteenth century, focusing primarily on women's writing, representations of gender, work, sexuality and the body, material culture studies and the eighteenth-century charity movement. She has recently completed a book on the relationship between manual and intellectual labour in women's writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, entitled Women's Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship, 1750-1830 (MUP, 2010). She is in the early stages of a new project on women’s magazines of the Romantic Era provisionally entitled Guilty and Other Pleasures. 

She is also editing a special issue of the journal Women’s Writing entitled Beyond Influence, 1660-1830. Click here for the call for papers.

Research Supervision

Jennie is currently supervising PhD dissertations on incest and the gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the works of Frances Burney; cosmetics, material culture and the Romantic-era novel; and amatory fiction. She would be interested in supervising other research students working in the fields of women’s writing, material culture studies, gender studies, and other related subjects in the long eighteenth century

Professional Activities

Jennie is an Associate Editor of CW3 Journal- a peer-reviewed electronic journal devoted to research on women's writing in the Romantic period. She is a member of the editorial board of the Pickering and Chatto Chawton House Library Series, in addition to serving as editor of the memoirs strand of the project, and Series Editor (with Cora Kaplan) of a forthcoming ten-volume History of British Women's Writing from the medieval period to the present. She is also the Reviews Editor of the Journal Women's Writing.

Jennie is also Co-Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century.

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Selected Publications

Books:

• Women’s Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship, 1750-1830 (MUP, 2010)
• Women and Material Culture, 1680-1830, co-edited with Cora Kaplan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House, co-edited with Megan Hiatt Pickering and Chatto, 2007)
• British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics, co-edited with Cora Kaplan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
• Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2005)

Some Recent Chapters and Articles:

• ‘“[C]onnections which are of service in a more advanced Age”: The Lady’s Magazine, community and women’s literary histories’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (forthcoming, 2011).
• ‘Mothers and Others: Sexuality and Maternity in The History of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760)’ in Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Markman Ellis and Ann Lewis (forthcoming: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
• ‘The “latent seeds of coquetry”: Amatory Fiction and the 1750s Novel, in Masters of the Marketplace: British Women Novelists of the 1750s, ed. Susan Carlile(Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press and Boydell and Brewer, 2011)
• 'Women and the Mid-century Novel', in The History of British Women's Writing, 1750-1830, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
• 'The Limits of Sympathy: The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760)', in Woman to Woman: Female Negotiations During the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Louise Duckling, Angela Escott and Carolyn D Williams (University of Delaware Press, 2010)
• 'Fictions of the Gift in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762)', in The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Cynthia Klekar and Linda Zionkowski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
• '"Your apparel manifest your mind": Dress and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature', in Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature, ed. Cindy Carlson and Cynthia Kuhn (Cambria, 2007)
• 'Reinstating the Pamela Vogue', in Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• '"The Claims of Literature": Women Applicants to the Royal Literary Fund', Women's Writing, 12: 3 (2005): 513-29.
• 'Reclothing the Female Reader: Dress and the Lady's Magazine', Women's History Magazine (Spring 2005): 11-20.
• 'Woman's Work: Labour, Gender and Authorship in the novels of Sarah Scott', in British Women's Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, History, Politics, ed. by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 19-33.
• '"Industry in Distress": Reconfiguring Femininity and Labour in the Magdalen House', Eighteenth-Century Life 28: 1 (2004): 1-20.
• 'Fashion and Frugality: Eighteenth-Century Pocket Books for Women', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 32 (2003): 1-18.

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