Penelope Aubin: Poet, Novelist, Negotiator, Businesswoman offers a dynamic appraisal of Penelope Aubin, bringing together new scholarship that situates her work at the intersection of religion, empire, gender, and literary experimentation. Ranging across her novels, poetry, and drama, the essays illuminate Aubin’s engagement with global geographies, political debate, and the shifting boundaries between romance and the emerging novel. Contributors explore themes including enslavement before racialization, cartographic imagination, satire, providential narrative, and incongruous humor, while reassessing her role in early eighteenth-century literary culture. By placing Aubin alongside various contemporary and modern contexts, and within broader transnational and theoretical frameworks, this volume demonstrates her importance as an innovative and intellectually ambitious writer. Together, these studies challenge critical neglect and redefine Aubin as a central figure whose works reshape our understanding of fiction, authorship, and cultural thought in the early modern Atlantic world.
