Leah Orr

Dr. Leah Orr's main research area is British literature of the long eighteenth century (1660-1820), particularly women writers, book history, and the novel.

She is the author of Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730 (University of Virginia Press, 2017), which challenges the "rise of the novel" theory for explaining the development of fiction and instead uses new research about the fiction marketplace to argue that booksellers had more influence on what was published and read than authors did.

Her most recent book, Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. It examines the material circumstances of publication for women writers to argue that they were presented in diverse ways in the decades before a "woman writer" was an established category and it provides a model for examining writers and texts which have left relatively little archival evidence.

Ph.D., English
Penn State University

M.A., English
Penn State University

B.A., English and Classical Studies
University of Washington

• Publishing the Woman Writer in England, 1670-1750
• https://global.oup.com/academic/product/publishing-the-woman-writer-in-england-1670-1750-9780192886293?cc=us&lang=en&
• Novel Ventures: Fiction and Print Culture in England, 1690-1730
• https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4982/