If we accept Hannah More's vision of the gendered literary landscape as normative, then the contest for Mount Parnassus by the end of the eighteenth century is, on one level, clearly decided. Women are welcome to amble in the low valley, but the elevated realm of literary achievement belongs to men. Despite the changing codes of gender that inform the negotiation of literary value, this patriarchal organization reigns throughout the years 1660–1790. The deceptively simple fact that emerges from the preceding chapters is that eighteenth-century British writers, both men and women, rely on the historically situated gendered hierarchy to justify and classify literature. Or, in less neutral terms, literary criticism encodes and reproduces the discursively constructed values of male authority and female contingency as transcendent aesthetic truths. By demonstrating how literary languages preserve and elevate an ideal consistent with masculine privilege in culture, even in the putatively feminine genre of the novel, this study dismisses the already suspect notion that literary form is politically neutral.

On another level, however, the contest for Mount Parnassus is still unsettled. The model of history incorporated here insists that local articulations have the potential to challenge or change hegemonic structures in discourse. The history of change in the dialogic interaction between gendered discourse and the language of literary criticism testifies to that possibility.