This book brings to the foreground the largely forgotten Fancy of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and follows its traces as they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth.
Trivialized for its flightiness and femininity Fancy nonetheless provided seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century women writers such as Margaret Cavendish Aphra Behn Delarivier Manley
Eliza Haywood and Anna Barbauld a mode of vision that could detect flaws in the
Enlightenment's patriarchal systems and glimpse new female-authored worlds and genres. In
carving out unreal fanciful spaces within the larger frame of patriarchal culture these women
writers planted Fancy-and with it female authorial invention-at the cornerstone of
Enlightenment empirical endeavor. By finally taking Fancy seriously this book offers an
alternate genealogy of female authorship and a new framework for understanding modernity's
triumph.
