Devoney Looser is Catherine P. Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri (http://www.devoneylooser.com). She is the the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2000; paperback 2005). Since 2004, she has served as co-editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, published quarterly by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In the summer of 2012, she will lead a 5-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on “Jane Austen and her Contemporaries" (http://nehseminar.missouri.edu).