Hacks of all kinds

David Barnett has a great blog post at the Guardian today entitled What's wrong with being a hack? Since my academic work focuses on professional women writers of the early eighteenth century — the era of Grub Street, paper wars, and slipping emetics into your literary enemies' drinks, if you happened to be Alexander Pope — I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about hackery.

Some of the writers I study are refreshingly honest about their status as hack writers; Laetitia Pilkington, in...