British Women Writers Research Articles

Heathcliff’s Demonization: A Reading of Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, the nineteenth-century English woman writer, together with her first and only published novel, Wuthering Heights, has always been a riddle in the history of British literature. Critics and readers are all curious about why a female writer should create such a merciless and malicious demon as Heathcliff in her novel. This paper explores Heathcliff’s demonization from three aspects: the root and inspiration of demonization as well as Heathcliff’s aspiration after a life of eternal bliss. On one hand, the repressions Heathcliff suffers from the society, culture, family and even himself are the roots of his demonization, while on the other, his rebellious spirit inspires his demonization. Unfortunately, no matter how thoroughly he rebels, he still can’t get satisfied or feel happy until starving himself to death, the only way for him to achieve a life of eternal bliss.

How Isabella Whitney read “Her” Christine de Pizan

ABSTRACT This essay provides the first evidence that Isabella Whitney read and imitated Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au Dieu d’Amours through Thomas Hoccleve’s 1402 translation in his Letter of Cupid, first published in Chaucer’s Works in 1532. The Copy of a Letter is the first example in print of an Englishwoman writer engaging with the work of this foundational early feminist author. Although Whitney may not have known she was reading Christine, she is especially attuned to the radical implications of this work. Whitney takes from The Letter of Cupid an ethos of female authorship, in which learned women act as cultural arbiters, and a template for how a woman author could engage in a humanist debate about the purpose of vernacular literature. One of the key differences from Christine’s work is that Whitney is addressing new constituencies for secular vernacular literature and a new class of readers, made up of both women and men, who were outside the court and traditional humanist centres of learning. Whitney’s imitation of Christine de Pizan in The Copy of a Letter adds to our understanding of the scope of her reading and her centrality to humanist culture, in all its diversity, in the mid-Tudor period.

In Search of Community. Eliza Orzeszkowa in the Circle of Questions of 19th-Century English Women Writers

The article deals with religious issues in selected novels by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The writer often manifested her distance to the Polish national Church and at the same time asked in her works about the possibility of creating a new type of religious community. The search of Orzeszkowa’s heroines is interpreted in the article in the context of the works of English women writers of the 19th century associated with the current of religious revival (Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot).

Why Austen, not Burney? Tracing the Mechanisms of Reputation and Legacy

During the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017, the narrative of Austen’s rise to fame and her ongoing celebrity circulated throughout modern culture. But how did this happen? When Austen died in 1817, it was not obvious that Austen would become the archetypal British woman writer. Frances Burney was far more famous in her lifetime than Austen was in hers, and Burney’s novels (particularly Evelina and Cecilia) achieved as much, if not more, critical acclaim than Austen’s works. By comparing the afterlives of Jane Austen and Frances Burney, the factors that shape legacy come into focus—and scholars can use some of these factors to shape the legacy of British women writers today.

Chawton House and its Library: Legacies and Futures

In a review of Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures, Paula Backscheider draws attention to “the miracle that is Chawton House, whose conferences nurtured these essays” in the collection. This essay will examine the legacy of this unique institution and explore the futures for the organization both as heritage site and as home to a substantial collection of women’s writing of the long eighteenth century. The community encouraged and nurtured by Chawton House since it opened to the public in 2003, as is so often the case with all things related to Jane Austen, complicates divisions between the academic and the popular, bringing together people of different backgrounds from all over the world. For diverse audiences, Chawton House—the Visiting Fellowship program, the reading group, the reading rooms, the collections, and, increasingly, the gardens and parkland—have provided the time, space, and material to explore, share, and delight in women’s contributions. This essay will celebrate work already done to maintain and shape the legacy of Jane Austen, her contemporaries, and her predecessors—the legacy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary world. It considers some of the challenges faced by heritage organizations like Chawton House in recovering and representing the work of early British women writers and shaping their legacy, exploring the ways in which issues of canonicity, value and reputation play out in both academic research and public engagement. It outlines some of the strategies used by Chawton House over the last two decades to meet these challenges, including public programming that introduces women writers little-known outside academic circles, but that also asks audiences to consider the conditions that rendered them obscure in the first place. It goes on to consider the ways in which the current moment – both the culture wars and the pandemic—has revitalized these questions of legacy by demanding new perspectives and providing new audiences for heritage organizations.

Between Amniotic and Semiotic: The Kristevan Maternal Body in Contemporary British Women’s Fiction

From her seminal study Powers of Horror (1980) to her more recent conceptualization of maternal reliance (2014), the attendant ambivalence of motherhood has been both a recurring theme in Julia Kristeva’s writing, as well as her dominant method to demonstrate the affinities between bodily transformation and psychic development. At the same time, the post-war literary narration of motherhood’s “impossible choices”, as one critic has written (Harnett 2019), has left scattered but memorable marks on the contemporary British literary canon. Experimental as well as established British women writers have attempted to document the affective ebb and flow of the maternal body as well as motherhood itself both as an individual experience and as a cultural and socioeconomic institution (Staub 2007). This essay examines such literary works from a Kristevan perspective, attempting a literary tracing of the herethics of maternal love (Kristeva 2014) in selected British women authors who have heret(h)ically imagined and articulated maternal ambivalence in the interwar and contemporary era. Employing the post-realist fiction of Olive Moore (1939), Doris Lessing (1988), and Jessie Greengrass (2018) as a springboard for a Kristevan analysis of maternal bodies, it is argued that the conceptualization of a herethics of maternal love finds its literary counterpart in a continuous tradition of women’s exploration of the ambivalent mother through an experimental narrative style, which in turn mirrors the construction of a new maternal body.

The medicinal recipes of Hannah Woolley: everyday practice and female authority in seventeenth-century England.

This article describes a seventeenth-century English woman writer's interests in medical care and the reasons that led her to publish texts on this topic. Hannah Woolley offered guidance on a wide variety of topics in the domestic sphere, including recipes for health and beauty. Here we investigate the principles that governed the preparation of these recipes, Woolley's intentions in writing on this topic, and the way in which academic medicine was translated and practiced by women routinely during this period. Defining these issues will help shed light on the scenario in which literate female healers worked and the nature of their relationships with learned physicians.

As receitas médicas de Hannah Woolley: prática cotidiana e autoridade feminina na Inglaterra do século XVII

Abstract This article describes a seventeenth-century English woman writer’s interests in medical care and the reasons that led her to publish texts on this topic. Hannah Woolley offered guidance on a wide variety of topics in the domestic sphere, including recipes for health and beauty. Here we investigate the principles that governed the preparation of these recipes, Woolley’s intentions in writing on this topic, and the way in which academic medicine was translated and practiced by women routinely during this period. Defining these issues will help shed light on the scenario in which literate female healers worked and the nature of their relationships with learned physicians.

Contemporary Black British Women's Writing: Experiments in Literary Form

Contemporary Black British Women's Writing:Experiments in Literary Form Elisabeth Bekers (bio) and Helen Cousins (bio) experimental writing, aesthetics, innovation, canon, Black British fiction, women's writing, women's and gender studies This special issue on Contemporary Black British Women's Writing showcases the range and variety of literary creativity of British women of African and African Caribbean descent since the 1990s through a mix of articles and interviews. If, as Tim Brennan suggested, Black British literature was still invisible in 1990, over the past thirty years, women writers especially have pushed this field into the limelight, prompting critics rightly to observe that "contemporary black writing of Britain [is] characterised more and more by the work of women writers" and that these women's literary endeavors are far "removed from the purview of 'Black British writing' as it has been predominantly understood."1 In this special issue, we understand that shift to be around the forms in which Black British women are writing. In a field that has been primarily appreciated for its exploration of lived Black experience, we want to pay attention to the innovations in writing that, from a literary perspective, are no less significant. In fact, we suggest that their experiments with language, style, and genre put Black British women at the vanguard of the British literary scene more broadly. This recognition raises critical questions about the extent to which precedence has been given to the politics over the aesthetics of their writing and the manner in which they have been siloed into a "minority" literature by way of their gender and race. Historically, the designation of "Black British" as a literary category was instrumental in giving Black writers in Britain more visibility and opportunities for publishing their work. John McLeod notes that, because canon building assists in transformative processes in society, the "construct[ion of] a genealogy of black British writing" helped to recognize the work of Black writers as included within the "narrative of national culture."2 The rise of Black British literature as a distinct category was part of a greater political drive on the part of Britain's Black communities to be recognized as belonging to Britain and being entitled to participate in public life and the shaping of national identity. Literary authors and intellectuals, most notably Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, strove to disprove the racist refrain resounding in the 1970s and 1980s that "there ain't no black in the Union Jack," and this growing awareness of Black British culture stimulated academic as well as public interest in the expanding body of Black British literature.3 [End Page 211] However, in part, this categorization also has prevented Black British women's writing from being recognized as part of the British literary mainstream, which explains some authors' rejection or pragmatic embrace of the label.4 As James English observes, the label Black British "was taken up in literary and other cultural spheres partly for reasons of commercial and curricular convenience, as a rough and ready way of situating a diverse and as yet uncataloged array of writers, artists, and works," but this institutionalization rapidly established Black British writing as something separate from the normative literary tradition typified by white, male, middle-class authors.5 More recently, Danuta Kean has explored how a distinct category for Black British writers affects the demands of the publishing industry. Her report, commissioned by Spread the Word (a writer development agency for London), identified pressures on what authors wrote about, narrow ideas of what was "authentic," and marketing strategies focused on author ethnicity.6 For instance, agents would advise authors to make their stories saleable by conforming to stereotypical views of Black (and Asian) communities (for example encouragement in "upping the sari count, dealing with gang culture or some other image that conforms to White preconceptions"7). These attitudes tend to favor sociological realism in Black British women's writing and encourage readers to approach the texts first and foremost as an authentic way to learn about an "other" experience.8 This paradoxical effect does not mean that we advocate rescinding the label "Black British." An "outsider" status can be valuable in freeing authors from the...

The Interrelatedness of Form and Content in Contemporary Black British Women's Writing: Interviews with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Laura Fish, Lou Prendergast, and Bernardine Evaristo

The Interrelatedness of Form and Content in Contemporary Black British Women's Writing: Interviews with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Laura Fish, Lou Prendergast, and Bernardine Evaristo

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Post-War British Women Writers and their Cultural Impact: A Quantitative Approach

This article uses a quantitative approach to study the reception of women writers in post-war Britain. Using data from two influential journals in the period (1946–1960), the TLS and the Listener, we first establish a list of those contemporary British women writers who were most frequently mentioned in these magazines. We then compare their representation in the magazines to that of three comparison groups: a selection of British male contemporary writers, well-known earlier British women writers, and canonical male authors. We explore how the differential categories of gender and canonicity intersect in the (under ) representation of contemporary women writers, and how this underrepresentation not only holds true for the mid-twentieth century but, at least as it is reflected in the attention paid to writers by TLS reviewers, continues in the later 20th and early 21st century.

The Nuclear Family from Wellington to Hiroshima: Eithne Wilkins's ‘Oranges and Lemons’

This is a recuperative essay addressing the work of Eithne Wilkins (1914–75), a poet with a strong presence in journals of the 1940s and 1950s, but now mainly remembered as the first translator (with her husband Ernst Kaiser) of Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I argue for her importance as a largely forgotten late modernist, and examine her major poetic sequence ‘Oranges and Lemons’, possibly the only long poem published by an English woman writer between 1945 and 1960, and almost certainly the most ambitious. It is comprised of a series of allusive poems incorporating memories of her New Zealand childhood, of her father Edgar, portrayed as a fire-watching doctor, and of the experience of her brother Maurice Wilkins, who worked on the Manhattan Project and later won a Nobel Prize. I argue that the poem, with its complex and personal mythopoesis, represents a response to global conflict in which the scattering of the ‘nuclear family’ figures a hemispheric war.

The Age of Decadence

What does “decadence” mean? Does it mean anything at all? Is it sinister or irresistibly appealing? Regardless of the ambiguity that surrounds the word “decadence” (often with a small “d”), no one can deny that decadence (frequently with a capital “D,” especially when it alludes to the late nineteenth-century European cultural movement) has been sweeping the world of academic publishing. Seen from the perspective of 2022, the past few years appear to have been, at least among scholars, a decade of decadence. Joseph Bristow opens his chapter on “Female Decadence” for the 2016 volumeThe History of British Women's Writing, 1880–1920by saying, “There is no question that by the mid-1890s one word had come to define avant-garde art and literature in Britain,” and that word was decadence. Judging by the recent proliferation of books and art exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic, history appears to be repeating itself and on a broader scale. Decadence is now defining, or at least preoccupying, many of us.

‘Restoring friendship and confidence as far as possible between the inimical nations’: Post-World War I Berlin through English eyes

Three British women writers and their memoirs or letters serve as the key witnesses to rapid change from war-torn Berlin to a highly desired tourist destination. The war-induced transition of Berlin was matched by the social changes for women whose traces can be found in the three texts: the writer’s position changes from that of the voyeuse to the flâneuse. While the old aristocratic cosmopolitanism in Evelyn Blücher’s and Helen D’Abernon’s circles was on the wane, a more middle-class cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by the Bloomsbury psychoanalyst and translator Alix Strachey, became more important in the aftermath of World War I. The three writers share an interest in social observation, but all three are tied by their particular upper-middle- or upper-class habitus. An image of Berlin emerges which predates Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin myth by at least a decade.

The Female Authorship:

This paper raises the possibility of a female authorship for the anonymous 14th century work The Cloud of Unknowing, which academics always attribute to a man. It points out four premises: firstly the error of sexual attribution of the authorship of The Mirror of Simple Souls, maintained until 20th century; secondly, the conception of woman by the English mystical male writers Rolle and Hilton, which is not found in the writings attributed to the author of The Cloud; thirdly, the literary, theological and mystical greatness of a English woman writer of 14th century, Julian of Norwich; and, finally, the scholars' considerations about the author (man for them) of The Cloud and its related treatises, which, notwithstanding, could perfectly be attributed to a woman of the fourteenth century in England. So, the conclusion invites to question the male authorship of this masterpiece, perhaps, for the first time.

From Silent Suffering to Strong Self Identity: A Study of Anees Jung’s Breaking the Silence

Anees Jung is one of the widely read post–independence Indian English women writers who write consciously of the issues that concern the educated middle-class women in Indian society. She attempts to closely analyze man-woman relationship within the family and the contemporary social set-up. She focuses on the captivating problems and the suffocating environs of her female characters who struggle hard in this malicious and male-dominated world to discover their true self identity. Jung does not advocate separation from the partner but a diplomatic assertion of one’s identity from silent suffering.

What Were Women Writers?

Abstract: Asking what were women writers—to themselves, to those they denigrated or dominated, and to "us"—is another way of asking who "we" were and are as feminist critics. White feminist critics—writing in a moment when violence against Black, brown, immigrant, queer, and trans women has become more visible than ever—have a responsibility to our nonwhite, non-Christian, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming students and colleagues who may find it impossible to identify with early modern women implicated in discourses that we now recognize as anti-Black, anti-Semitic, or homo- and transphobic. Accordingly, this essay argues that we must historicize early modern English women writers' own self-identification as such in the context of the racial, colonial, and imperial projects from which many materially benefitted and whose hierarchies many instrumentalized. This history complicates assumptions that women's writing is necessarily politically radical—or even necessarily feminist in the fullest sense of that term. English women writers in all their guilt and complexity must be studied more closely than ever if early modern scholars are to better understand the past that has helped produce our current discriminatory norms and systemic injustices, both within and beyond feminist criticism.

Discoveries in the Archives: New Sarah Harriet Burney Letters at the Borthwick Institute for Archives

Discoveries in the Archives:New Sarah Harriet Burney Letters at the Borthwick Institute for Archives Lorna J. Clark (bio) Keywords Sarah Harriet Burney, Crewe family, archives, letters, Frances Burney, early English women writers, women's writing, women's and gender studies Moments of discovery in the archives have become less common in a digital age that has revolutionized methods of scholarly research. General searches on the internet can pinpoint the location of archival material while more focused searches of library websites may yield detailed catalogue descriptions or even digital images of holdings. Technical expertise replaces the kind of diligent on-the-ground research that used to involve much correspondence and travel. Three decades ago, when I began my research on a little-known novelist, Sarah Harriet Burney (1772–1844), half-sister to the more famous novelist Frances Burney, I started with a search for materials, a quest that involved mailing some 2,500 letters to archivists, librarians, dealers, and collectors around the world. This task built on the ground-breaking efforts made twenty years earlier by Joyce Hemlow and her colleagues at McGill University, who managed (through a blitz of inquiries) to locate 10,000 Burney family manuscripts in 100 collections, including 168 letters of Sarah Harriet's.1 My own more targeted search uncovered Burney manuscripts in another 30 locations, including 14 letters of Sarah Harriet that were previously unknown (and another found in a printed source). Such a modest result was reassuring, in that the letters I found were stragglers; no secret cache came to light.2 I published the 183 known letters in my edition of her correspondence, The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney (1997).3 I knew, of course, that the number of surviving letters represented a small proportion of the total number of those written over a lifetime. For Burney's contemporary, Jane Austen, a comparable number of letters (about 160) survive from all those she wrote, which has been estimated at 3,000 or even 7,500.4 The latter figure assumes an average of one a day over her adult life; a similar calculation for Burney (who lived much longer than Austen) would yield a total of 18,000 letters. A single letter of Burney's that has recently come to light shows why it is difficult to calculate how many letters have been lost. Affectionate and lively, it was written to a previously unknown correspondent, Marianne Nicholson, an artist who gave drawing lessons to Burney for a brief period.5 [End Page 137] In Burney's extant letters, her name is mentioned just once, so the closeness of their friendship and the fact that they corresponded was not evident. This discovery underlines the fact that any number of letters might have been written to previously unknown and unimagined correspondents (friends, colleagues, neighbors, tradesmen) and lost without a trace. Their number is incalculable. Possible losses also include runs of correspondence that I deduce must be missing, in whole or in part. For instance, relatively few of Sarah Harriet's letters to her half-sister Frances (Burney) d'Arblay survive and none at all to Esther Burney, despite mentions of letters that passed between them. Many letters to her favorite niece, Charlotte Barrett, were kept but far fewer to Charlotte's mother, Sarah Harriet's favorite half-sister, to whom she also wrote frequently. There are relations on her mother's side, including her half-brother, aunt, and cousins, to whom just a few letters are extant, the remnants, no doubt, of longer runs of correspondence. Sarah Harriet's brother Richard probably kept in touch with her after he sailed to India, given that some of his children certainly did; a few tantalizing references to letters she received from them remain but not the actual letters. Among Burney's habitual correspondents were members of three families—Gregor, Wilbraham, and Crewe—for whom she worked at different periods either as governess or companion and from whom she frequently mentions hearing. I made a special effort to find some of this missing correspondence, particularly with the Crewe family, whose papers were deposited at the Cheshire Record Office. Among these papers, I could find nothing relating to...

How Women Wrote about Themselves: A Corpus- informed Comparison of Women Writers’ Defences in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century England

Women’s written defences of their sex developed within the literary context of the querelle des femmes, a mainly male debate on female intellectual worth, which started in the Middle Ages and came to a peak during the Renaissance. This paper focuses on the discourse some women writers started to develop in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England, when the growing number of misogynist attacks led some of them to respond in kind. The first works directly engaging the topics of the querelle are usually identified in Isabella Whitney’s poem The Copy of a Letter (1567) and Jane Anger’s Jane Anger Her Protection For Women (1589). These are coupled with three later pamphlets framed in the so-called Swetnam debate, from the name of the misogynist pamphleteer to whom these three women writers replied, namely A Muzell for Melastomus (1617) by Rachel Speght, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617) by Ester Sowernam and The Worming of a Mad Dogge: or, A Soppe for Cerberus, a Redargution of the Bayter of Women (1617) by Constantia Munda. The qualitative reading of the texts reveals differences among them both in content and structure, which is supported by a corpus-informed quantitative comparison between the earlier and the later texts. The quantitative analysis also shows differences in the use of specific high and low frequency querelle-related lemmas, which signal a variation in the semantic fields related to the discourse on women. Such a mixed research method approach suggests that these variations could not be entirely ascribed to those literary works which had established the formal guidelines of the genre of the controversy, The Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus of Rotterdam and De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529) by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. To understand where these differences may come from, the English querelle texts are quantitatively compared with a small corpus of Italian defences of women, including Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600) by Moderata Fonte and La nobilità, et l’eccellenza delle donne, co’diffetti, et mancamenti, de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1600; 1621) by Lucrezia Marinella. This quantitative analysis shows that English and Italian women writers appear to share some structural and content-related characteristics which cannot be found in either Erasmus’ or Agrippa’s works or contemporary English writers dealing with the querelle. The hypothesis is thus advanced that there may have been literary contacts between England and Italy that indirectly influenced the development of the discourse on women within the context of the querelle des femmes.