DEVONEY LOOSER. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850.

Abstract

Devoney Looser’s study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers in old age has a striking opening: Virginia Woolf’s claim, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), that ‘Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney’. Burney died in 1840 aged 87, having outlived Austen by some 23 years. Woolf’s ‘impossible admonition’ arises, Looser argues, from a commonplace failure to attend to women writers after they reach old age—a failure that has impoverished accounts of women’s writing lives, and that in certain cases (Woolf’s included) has produced oddly distortive literary periodisations. Looser’s book is an attempt to make good the neglect, and to pose a set of conceptual challenges to literary history: how far was the old age of women writers a factor in their critical reception? How far did it shape their self-perceptions, including their perception of their literary powers and their right to an audience? Could older women expect to find success more readily in certain genres than in others? What might it mean to speak of women writers in old age as an identifiable grouping that cuts across differences in economic power, social status, and earlier reputational standing?