The 35th anniversary of the ASECS Women's Caucus offers an opportunity to celebrate the impact on eighteenth-century studies of scholarship produced by those who support and participate in the work of the Caucus. This essay joins that celebration by offering a broadly drawn sketch of some representative questions and methods that have emerged since the Caucus was founded in 1975, by observing trends in current work, and by broaching some predictions about directions that scholarly work by members of the Caucus might be expected to take in the future. 1 Over the past thirty-five years, scholarship by members of the Women's Caucus has been immense and varied-in fact, so immense and varied (and from such a variety of disciplinary contexts, theoretical positions, and scholarly investments, and in such a variety of formats) that no single essay could adequately recognize it all. For that reason, I make no effort at "coverage." Instead, this essay will delineate broad trends that have characterized a small subset of Caucus members' workbook length , gender-oriented interpretations of British prose fiction. This contracted focus reflects my own specialized interests and the limits of the essay form, not the true shape of what has been accomplished or some special representational function of gender-oriented scholarship on prose fiction. The richness of recent work in contexts not addressed here could provoke any number of essays similar to this one-and I hope it may do so. The final three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the development of a number of new critical orientations committed to recognizing what Roxann Wheeler has called "categories of difference." 2 Gender difference was among the earliest such categories to be addressed, and, by now, work that takes gender fundamentally into account has provided eighteenth-century studies with a vastly expanded set of textual objects and authorial personae, as well as new methods and purposes. This essay concentrates on that process of development.
