Locating Women’s Book History in The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing

Abstract:Francis Stainforth (1797–1866), a British Anglican curate, owned the largest private library of Anglophone women’s writing in the nineteenth century, comprised of works published between 1546 and 1866. This article argues that a study of Stainforth’s library catalog, and the thousands of rarely studied works and authors within it, recovers women’s book history from a historical perspective. Further, digital humanities (DH) methods, like mapping, are especially useful for studying and recovering women’s book history at scale, as demonstrated by The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing project.