A Mid-Range Team of Rivals: Women Novelists in the Collective Biographies of Women Database.

A collaborative, interdisciplinary study (English, history) of the authors, subjects, contents, and substance of a key early collection of criticism of women novelists, tied to the Queen's 1897 Jubilee. Famous or obscure women novelists assess the work of deceased peers, censuring most those who are now canonical. Attending to the style and orientation of particular chapters and some research in publishing history, we suggest varied textual and quantitative approaches, drawing on our database of 1,272 collective biographies of women to explore what we can discover from one book carefully contextualized, instead of distant reading in a much larger corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]