Alt empirically solves

Significantly, however, this introduction also suggested a gendered variation on that view of authorial ownership-one allowing for empathetic sharing between the woman writer and her female reader(s). This vision of collective au- thorship also imagined shared circulation capabilities, though not composition credit, based on a gender-specific ability to access the text. Such a view of shared yet care- fully credited textual intellectual property, then, could help refine readers' genre expectations-whether for domestic teaching narratives or other women's books, such as romances (see Radway). In this case, the "lady" editor linked her expansion of the text's "benefit" to a broader audience with another kind of intellectual labor- the gendered task of teaching young children to read. Implicitly, her prefatory com- ments connect her audience's use of this text with their having the responsibility for home reading instruction. For this editor, then, and for her anticipated audience, ownership of the Lessons was cast as communal, grounded in a common gender iden- tity and related social role, even though credit for its efficacy was still assigned to the original author.

The affiliative stance toward shared authorship that was staked out by the 1788 "lady" editor of Barbauld's text was upheld over the years by later women editors, who also carefully credited her authorial power even when adapting her text to fit their own Americanized needs. Editors like Sarah Hale, Mary Hughs, and Grace Ellis, packaging Barbauld's work throughout the nineteenth century, continued to distribute Barbauld's authorship in ways anticipating what Lunsford (drawing on Esther Dyson) has described as grounded "in the relationships surrounding and nurturing the movement of content through networks of users and producers" ("Rhetoric" 534). These women editors positioned their own management of Barbauld's texts as affiliative network building but still honored her authorial power- even, as was often said, her "genius."