Rogers's first
monograph,
Bookseller as Rogue: John Almon and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Publishing was published in 1986 to mixed reviews. This book presents the writer and publisher
John Almon as a "rogue" for his opportunistic business decisions, and uses his career as an example of how politics affected booksellers in the period. It was published while Radcliffe was experiencing a revitalization of scholarly interest, and provides source material demonstrating her mixed and frequently-changing reputation since the eighteenth century. including imitations, adaptations, parodies, and works spuriously attributed to Radcliffe. It also presents the first biography of Radcliffe to include information from her
commonplace book, which had previously been ignored. Many previous biographies debated sensationalist rumors that Radcliffe had been driven to madness and death by her
Gothic writing, without seeking documentary evidence. Rogers instead uses Radcliffe's commonplace book to describe the details of Radcliffe's treatment for asthma and digestive problems in the last years of her life. 's painting
The Nightmare (1781) was on the cover of
Two Gothic Classics by Women, edited by Rogers In 1995, Rogers edited two books for
Signet Classics. The second, published as
Two Gothic Classics by Women, combined
Northanger Abbey (1818) by
Jane Austen and
The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe. Its cover featured
Henry Fuseli's painting "
The Nightmare" (1781). It includes chapters on Radcliffe's critical reception and commonplace book,
Northanger Abbey, and
Rob Roy, which she discussed in her previous works. It also includes a chapter on
Pamela (1740) by
Samuel Richardson, a chapter on the medical complications of childbirth described in midwife manuals, and a section on modern television
soap operas. The book defines matrophobia as the "fear of mothers," "fear of becoming a mother," and "fear of identification with and separation from the maternal body", and argues that
patriarchal culture causes women's relationships with each other to be driven by a metaphorical matrophobia. Rogers particularly criticizes anti-maternalism in
feminist and
psychoanalytic theorists. The final section on soap operas argues that the fragmented narrative structure of daytime television also reinforces patriarchal values. == Bibliography ==