Obscure Women, Obscure Networks, and Women's Book History

abstract:This essay explores how acts of forgetting in literary and book history take place by suggesting that obscurity is not merely the opposite of being recovered but is instead a powerful and multivalent force that operates in various and complex ways, often inflected by gender. Because obscurity is difficult to trace and define, Andrew Winckles argues in this essay, personal, familiar, and religious networks are an important nexus for studying it. He traces the intertwined lives of Sally Wesley and Marianne Francis as an exercise in discovering some of the conditions of obscurity and more broadly theorizing what it means for women in book history.