UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In the Fall of 2000, I entered UCLA as a medievalist, eager to explore English and continental romance. But it wasn’t long before my course of study changed, thanks to Felicity Nussbaum’s seminar on a prominent network of eighteenth-century women writers, the Bluestockings, which quickly won me to a later period. During that first quarter of graduate study, I discovered the work of Clara Reeve, whose Progress of Romance (1785) foregrounded, in a much more dramatic and exciting way, some of the same issues that had initially attracted me to medieval literature, such as the relationship between romance and women, as well as inclusive “feminine” romance and exclusive “masculine” epic, and the role of romance as a national literature.