Romance Readers and Romance Writers: by Sarah Green

Sarah Green (1790-1825) is one of the lesser-known authors from a period of great literary legacy, encompassing the likes of Austen, Burney and Radcliffe. Frequently satirizing their romantic and gothic work, she gained a reputation as an 'angry' parodist within nineteenth-century literature for her direct criticism of other authors' style of work. Such unveiled attacks are highly atypical for a female writer of the era, and a clear challenge to the presumption of male literary authority. This edition of Romance Readers and Romance Writers (1810) is the first modern scholarly publication of what is arguably her most famous novel. As with many of her other works, Green adopts numerous sophisticated methods to parody her contemporaries, most notably in the form of her heroine Peggy/Margaritta. Aside from such characters and the narrative itself, Green embellishes her story with a range of paratextual material such as chapter epigraphs and footnotes, allowing a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction.