An interdisciplinary study of women and language in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Speaking Volumes focuses on the connections that contemporaries made between speech and reading. It studies the period's discourses on "woman's language" and contrasts them with the linguistic practices of individual women. The book also argues that the oral performance of literature was important in fostering domesticity and serving as a means for women to practice authoritative speech. Utilizing a range of evidence gleaned from language texts, schoolbooks, diaries,...