Abstract: This book argues that kinship relations between writers, both literal and figurative, played a central part in the creation of a national tradition of English literature in the years 1660-1830. Weaving together biographical readings, reception study, and feminist cultural analysis, it offers a new picture of the English literary canon as a symbolic family. Through studies of writing relationships, including those between William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry and Sarah Fielding, Frances and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, it shows that kinship between writers played a significant role not only in individual lives but in key events of literary history, including the rise of the novel and the genesis of Romanticism. As writers looked back to founding fathers, and hoped to have writing sons, the literary tradition was modelled on the patriarchal family, imagined in tropes of genealogy and inheritance. This process marginalized but did not exclude women, and the book highlights the importance both of myths of motherhood and the daughterly position accorded women writers to the formation of literary tradition. The complex role of the literary mentor and its relationship to tropes of paternity are also discussed. The study ranges from the work of Dryden, with its emphasis on literature as patrilineal inheritance, to the reception of Austen, which shows uneven but significant process towards understanding the woman writer as an inheriting daughter and generative mother.

Keywords: literary tradition, patrilineal inheritance, mentor, family, women writers, writing relationships, novel, Romanticism, Dryden, Wordsworth