Celia in search of a husband. By a modern antique ... Second edition

London: printed at the Minerva-Press for A. K. Newman and Co. (Successors to Lane, Newman, and Co.) Leadenhall-Street, 1809. 2 volumes, 8vo, pp. viii, 322, [2] Minerva ads; [4], 306, [2] different Minerva ads; original blue paper-covered boards, cream paper shelfback, original printed paper labels on spine; labels still legible but clearly worn, pieces missing at top and bottom of the spines; all else good and sound, or better. Three editions of this novel were published in 1809. "Nothing is known of Medora Gordon Byron. She has been tentatively, but not conclusively, identified as Julia Maria Byron (1782-1858), a cousin of George Gordon Byron. There are two sets of novels which have been traditionally attributed to Medora Gordon Byron, five published under the name 'Miss Byron' and three under the pseudonym 'A Modern Antique.' Both groups of novels were brought out by the notorious Minerva Press, a highly successful London publisher of Gothic, sensation, and other popular genres. Susan Brown et al. writes that '[b]oth strings of fiction are exclamatory in style, interested in domesticity, and latterly in the unmarried (both men and women), given sometimes to commentary on novel-writing.' Some twenty-first century experts maintain that it is unlikely that the same person authored both series, but Caroline Franklin, the editor of the only modern edition of this author's work, considers Julia Byron to be 'a distinct possibility' for the author of all eight novels ... The 'Modern Antique' persona has been described as conservative and a moralist, yet also as the author of the 'high-spirited and entertaining ... anti-Jacobin' Celia in Search of a Husband. The literary quality is not what interests recent scholars, however, but rather Byron's role as a professional woman writer, such as her use of 'multiple authorial identities,' a strategy she shared with Ann Hatton and Elizabeth Meeke, both of whom also published with Minerva" (Wikipedia). Not in Sadleir or Wolff.