Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (review)

Abstract

Scholars of women's writing will welcome the publication of this collection of essays— part of Cambridge University Press's Women and Literature series—as an important companion to such earlier works as Dorothy Mermin's Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (1993). Like Mermin, the authors of Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 aspire to map networks of affiliation among female writers of the period, privileging the question of professionalism as they do so. Where Joanne Shattock and her contributors most productively depart from Mermin, however, is in the capaciousness of their project. Mermin's study "deals primarily with high culture and its environs [...] and pays little attention to kinds of writing (hymns, conduct books, political pamphlets, most periodical literature) that were defined as outside the world of high culture" (xviii). Shattock's contributors place no such limit on their investigations. In her chapter on women and the theater, Katherine Newey offers the astonished observation that "on surveying the range of women playwrights over the nineteenth century, it is as if a whole school of new work by women has been 'discovered', and there are now some 500 new authors who must be incorporated into our understanding of women's writing in the nineteenth century" (195). So too, Virginia Blain concludes her overview of primarily middle-class women's poetry with the promise that "a number of other lesser-known working class poets are gradually coming to light as researchers turn their attention to the newspaper archives" (184). Shattock and company focus on more occasion-specific and decidedly minor works than does Mermin, excavating a vastly under-studied cultural landscape. The results of their industry in the archives fairly promise to alter our perceptions of nineteenth-century, and more specifically, Victorian women's literary culture.