Modern English Women Research Articles

Relocating Women’s Writing: The Production and Reproduction of Early Modern British Women’s Works

Relocating Women’s Writing: The Production and Reproduction of Early Modern British Women’s Works

Assessing the accuracy of body mass estimation equations from pelvic and femoral variables among modern British women of known mass

Femoral head diameter is commonly used to estimate body mass from the skeleton. The three most frequently employed methods, designed by Ruff, Grine, and McHenry, were developed using different populations to address different research questions. They were not specifically designed for application to female remains, and their accuracy for this purpose has rarely been assessed or compared in living populations. This study analyzes the accuracy of these methods using a sample of modern British women through the use of pelvic CT scans (n = 97) and corresponding information about the individuals' known height and weight. Results showed that all methods provided reasonably accurate body mass estimates (average percent prediction errors under 20%) for the normal weight and overweight subsamples, but were inaccurate for the obese and underweight subsamples (average percent prediction errors over 20%). When women of all body mass categories were combined, the methods provided reasonable estimates (average percent prediction errors between 16 and 18%). The results demonstrate that different methods provide more accurate results within specific body mass index (BMI) ranges. The McHenry Equation provided the most accurate estimation for women of small body size, while the original Ruff Equation is most likely to be accurate if the individual was obese or severely obese. The refined Ruff Equation was the most accurate predictor of body mass on average for the entire sample, indicating that it should be utilized when there is no knowledge of the individual's body size or if the individual is assumed to be of a normal body size. The study also revealed a correlation between pubis length and body mass, and an equation for body mass estimation using pubis length was accurate in a dummy sample, suggesting that pubis length can also be used to acquire reliable body mass estimates. This has implications for how we interpret body mass in fossil hominins and has particular relevance to the interpretation of the long pubic ramus that is characteristic of Neandertals.

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing. Julie A. Eckerle.

<i>Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing</i>. Julie A. Eckerle.

The Politics of Election in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

This essay suggests that the inward style of Wroth's sonnet sequence can be attributed to her reliance on a Protestant discourse of election that shares symbols commonly associated with Petrarchism, such as the tortured heart, the occluding dark, and the illuminating light. As I will further argue, the language of predestination had become an oppositional discourse by 1621, enabling Wroth's public self-identification with other militant Protestants such as William Herbert, who opposed the political and religious policies of James I.

Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 Roxanne Eberle Devoney Looser , Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 252 pp. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, Devoney Looser suggests that examining the late careers of British women writers is a necessarily "compensatory gesture" for nineteenth-century critics who have focused upon issues of gender and genre without paying adequate attention to the significance of aging, particularly given the notably long lives of many of their literary subjects. As she trenchantly observes, "We have, for more than a century, comprehended the late lives of early modern British women writers too rosily, too darkly, or more often, not at all" (178). Looser unapologetically identifies the source of such misrepresentation and neglect as "ageism, whether malignant or benign" (168), and identifies some of the larger repercussions of disregarding the total arc of a literary career. Close analysis of the lives and works of nineteenth-century women writers reveals fissures — or perhaps more accurately bridges — between literary periods constructed around the lives and careers of male writers. The careers of many women writers are often incommensurable with standard literary periodizations, as critics such as Susan Staves, Anne Mellor, and Isobel Armstrong have also noted. Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney, often identified as "eighteenth-century writers," both lived and published into the Victorian period, and it would have been impossible for Austen to have acted upon Virginia Woolf's injunction to pay homage at Burney's grave, since she died nearly two decades before her "predecessor." While the fact of the nineteenth-century [End Page 414] woman writer's longevity has been noted, Looser's book makes a truly original contribution to a comparative study of several different women writers. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain is written as a goad to other critics. Looser tends to ask questions rather than answer them, inviting her readers to follow avenues of study towards which she directs them. The exploratory nature of her critical methodology is evident throughout the volume: she examines the differences between the careers of several writers rather than construct a single unifying narrative. Indeed, she frequently refers to the chapters as "case studies," and she explores diverse perspectives on women writers and old age. As Looser notes, there was no single model for the aging professional woman writer in the nineteenth century, since it was only in mid-century that such a group came to be known: "These long-lived writers negotiated the literary marketplace early in their lives, during a time when women authors achieved greater visibility and, for some, greater respectability. Then, in their later years . . . these authors encountered a new set of complicated prejudices for which they were largely unprepared" (1). As Looser goes on to demonstrate, women writers chose various paths as they sought to sustain their cultural authority as authors, shape their posthumous reputations, or simply make enough money to guarantee themselves a relatively comfortable old age. Steadfastly committed to her contention that there is no single story to be told about old age and women writers, Looser synthesizes a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to construct a picture of the conflicting attitudes towards aging, gender, and authorship at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. She describes the multiple ways in which women writers responded to the range of unattractive representations of them in their culture, where they appear as rouged and bitter crones, benevolent and bespectacled wise women, or, more commonly perhaps, anachronistic nonentities. Much of the success of the Introduction, which is both compelling and persuasive, lies in its inclusion of a large group of women writers, ranging from Charlotte Lennox (whose prosperous career did not protect her from an impoverished old age) to Joanna Baillie (who publicly renounced writing for philanthropy) to Lady Morgan (who concealed her true age and refused to abandon an image of sexual desirability well into her eighties). The sweeping survey in the Introduction usefully situates the more detailed case studies that follow. In the first chapter of the volume, Looser contrasts...

Recreating the Canon: Women Writers and Anthologies of Early Modern Verse

During the late 1980s and early 1990s feminist scholars reviewed the way in which writing produced by early modern Englishwomen was being studied. They demanded more accurate and thorough historical research into both women's lives and their texts, and also a better understanding of women's use of genre. Recent anthologies of poetry demonstrate that while much extensive and valuable historical research has since taken place, the formal aspects of women's texts have been widely overlooked. In contrast, historicist interest in texts by men has been accompanied by a continued emphasis on literary style. These divergent critical approaches make it difficult to reconcile the two currently separate canons of literature by women and that by men, preventing a better appreciation of the early modern canon as a whole.

“The Queen of the Waste Land”: The Endgames of Modernism in Angela Carter's Magic Toyshop

Patricia Juliana Smith is associate professor of English at Hofstra University. She is author of Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction (1997), editor of The Queer Sixties (1999), and coeditor of En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (1995) and Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (forthcoming). Her book in progress is Britannia Waives the Rules: The Permissive Society in Postimperial British Literature and Culture.

The Cultural Geographies of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Journeys Across Spaces and Times

AbstractThis essay reviews the ways in which recent studies of early modern women’s writing have both extended the geographical scope of that canon, and have increasingly sought to situate it in relation to expansive, detailed and complex cultural geographies of the period. This broadening of the canon requires scholars to confront unfamiliar genres, new scholarly challenges and novel critical concerns, and thus demands that we think about fresh ways of reading these texts. How can paying new attention to the metaphorical and literal places and journeys of early modern women’s writing help the field to respond to this demand for growth, in terms of both content and methodology? To address this question, I review the body of work that is already taking up these challenges, and suggest some directions for further exploration that would enable us to develop a properly internationalist, Atlantic and comparative approach to early modern British women’s writing.

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers

:Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen demonstrates how six early modern authors exploit, or evade, a rhetorical discourse founded upon images, tropes, and dialectics of violence to secure authorization for their work as writers and empowerment for the personal agendas unique to each of them. Rhetorical violence functions both as a literary phenomenon, facilitating the polemics of each author, and as an analytical methodology enabling scholars to derive meaning from a particular organic facet of a writer's intellectual structure. The subjects of the study represent a balance between writers who have received considerable scholarly attention (Elizabeth I, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Mary Wroth) and those who have received relatively little (Anne Askew, Anne Dorwiche, and Lade Anne Southwell). Exercising rhetorical strategies that reflect their idiosyncrasies as intellectuals, they share a canny awareness of the persuasive power, of violence in their age as physical reality and as metaphor.

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Voilence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Voilence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Voilence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Voilence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Modern British women writers: an A-to-Z guide

Introduction Adcock , Fleur by Roberta M. Schreyer Bainbridge, Beryl by AndRE L. DeCuir Barker, Pat by Laura Frost Bedfors, Sybille by Mitchell R. Lewis Bowen, Elizabeth by Stella Deen Brittain, Vera by Britta Zangen Brookner, Anita by Del Ivan Janik Brophy, Brigid by Karl L. Stenger Byatt, A. S. by Maria Koundoura Carter, Angela by Anna Katsavos Christie, Agatha by Alan Lutkus Churchill, Caryl by Joel Shatzky Compton-Burnett, Ivy by Jonathan Bolton Devlin, Anne by Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw Drabble, Margaret by Joseph Zepetello Duffy, Maureen by Regina M. Buccola Emecheta, Buchi by Jerilyn Fisher Fitzgerald, Penelope by Douglas Clayton Gems, Pam by Jose Ramo Prado Perez Hill, Susan Elizabeth by Mary Louise Hill Holtby, Winifred by Patricia Rae Hosain, Atia by Ashok Bery Howard, Elizabeth Jane by Heike Elisabeth Jungst James, P. D. by Tony Giffone Jameson, Storm by Phyllis Lassner Jellicoe, Ann by Neil Novelli Johnson, Pamela Hansford by Chris Hopkins Keatley, Charlotte by Regina M. Buccola Lehmann, Rosamund by Jonathan Bolton Lessing, Doris by Del Ivan Janik Lively, Penelope by Jacqueline Gmuca Mansfield, Katherine by Karla Alwes Markandaya, Kamala by Hena Ahmad Melville, Pauline by John Thieme Mew, Charlotte by Gina Wisker Mortimer, Penelope by Jana L. French Murdoch, Iris by John Louis DeGaetani Nichols, Grace by Suzanne Scafe Pym, Barbara by Marlene SanMiguel Groner Rhys, Jean by Joy Castro Richardson, Dorothy by Laura Frost Sackville-West, Vita by Peter F. Naccarato Sayers, Dorothy L. by Edmund Miller Sinclair, May by Melinda Harvey Sitwell, Edith by Gina Wisker Smith, Stevie by Julie Sims Steward Spark, Muriel by Frank Kelly St. Aubin De Teran, Lisa by Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson Taylor, Elizabeth Coles by Robert Ellis Hosmer Jr. Thirkell, Angela by Mitchell R. Lewis Townsend Warner, Sylvia by Chris Hopkins Weldon, Fay by Kathleen Ellis Wertenbaker, Timnerlake by John H. Lutterbie Wesley, Mary by Beverley E. Schneller West, Rebecca by Sarah Miles Watts Winterson, Jeanette by Maria Koundoura Woolf, Virginia by Peter F. Naccarato Young, E. H. by Stella Deen Bibliography Index

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights ed. by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights ed. by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. Patricia Juliana SmithOther Women: Lesbian/Bisexual Experience and Psychoanalytic Views of Women. Beverly Burch

<i>Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction</i>. Patricia Juliana Smith<i>Other Women: Lesbian/Bisexual Experience and Psychoanalytic Views of Women</i>. Beverly Burch

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Marilyn R. Farwell Patricia Juliana Smith. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. xvii + 236 pp. Patricia Juliana Smith’s book on women’s fiction of the twentieth century is an exciting and welcome addition to the study of women’s writing and especially to the study of lesbianism in fiction. Although at the outset, Smith distances her study from recent theories of lesbian fiction, her book must be considered part of the growing work on lesbianism in fiction because it not only explores thematic instances of lesbian panic in straight women’s and, for the most part, closeted lesbian fiction but also develops and describes lesbian panic as a structural element in narrative. Lesbian panic becomes, in Smith’s text, a narrative device that creates plot movement in the traditional heterosexual, romantic story. As a technique of narrative structuring, lesbian panic occurs as an unacknowledged trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, indicating an author’s rather than a character’s fears of lesbianism, and later as acknowledged lesbian characters who disrupt the courtship plot in twentieth-century women’s fiction. Smith covers a range of women writers, from Virginia Woolf to Jeanette Winterson, arguing that the use of this device shifts even in the twentieth century from innuendo to an open acknowledgment of lesbian existence. In the process of this examination, Smith offers insightful readings of texts by twentieth-century women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Brigid Brophy, and Fay Weldon. The definition of lesbian panic is in one way quite simple; it is, as [End Page 436] Smith says, “the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character—or, conceivably, an author—is unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire.” Smith develops but also distinguishes lesbian panic from Eve Sedgwick’s definition of gay male panic. Gay male panic occurs when men experience the potential loss of subjectivity through identification with women’s position as the Other; women, however, fear the loss of value in a heterosexual system of exchange in which their economic security is at stake. In the romance or courtship plot, lesbian panic provides for narratability, forcing a crisis in the heterosexual plot system but also providing for movement that propels the plot to its accepted, heterosexual closure. This narrative situation, then, is not ideal for the representation of lesbianism in fiction but has been prominent in the historical context of the repression of homosexuality. Smith’s ideals for the narratability of lesbianism without such a negative trope are “narrative strategies that carve out a space in fiction for lesbianism as a thing in and of itself.” The ideal narratives Smith envisions are nonmimetic and experimental, placing her on the side of current postmodern critics who believe that only postmodern experimental fiction can narrate lesbianism given the imperatives of the heterosexual plot system. Thus, although Smith eschews philosophical quarrels, postmodern assumptions of the inadequacy of the romance narrative and the nondefinition of lesbian as a “free-floating signifier” are important to her arguments. Her careful readings, particularly of Virginia Woolf’s texts, are excellent examples of the quality both of her prose and of her analytic skills. Long, insightful analyses of The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse occupy the second chapter and set the tone for the attention to narrative detail that marks the rest of the book. In The Voyage Out, lesbian panic is barely implied, but it is Mrs. Dalloway herself who narrates her lesbian panic in that eponymous novel, which provides insightful comments on both male and female homosexual panic. Woolf, who was clearly bisexual, gradually moves out of the narrative dilemma of lesbian panic with Lily in To the Lighthouse. Here, Smith’s postmodern views again emerge without much argument when she describes Lily as negotiating the “traps of gender,” allowing her the potential to love a woman and complete herself artistically. With Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts, Woolf presents the fullest development of an open lesbian, but since the trope of lesbian panic is not...

Lesbian panic: homoeroticism in modern British women's fiction

In many works by modern British women writers, two women form a strong bond only to have that relationship stymied, paralyzed or interrupted. A female character, fearing discovery of covert desires, lashes out at another woman, resulting in emotional or physical harm to herself or others. Patricia Smith defines this narrative as lesbian panic. What happens when a character or an author is unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or desire? For Smith, is often a fear of losing one's identity and value within the heterosexual paradigm. Smith traces the history of lesbian panic through key works: Woolfe's The Voyage Out and Mrs Dalloway; Bowen's The Little Girls and Eva Trout; Brophy's King of a Rainy Day; Lessing's The Golden Notebook; and Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Smith reveals how and why this is represented and she explores how postmodern writers have attempted to break away from this narrative.

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction

A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800

THE LITERARY AND INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITIES OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISHWOMEN have received much attention. Yet we still know very little about their relationship to the study of history.1 This neglect is understandable, since the world of the published historian remained, for all but a few, well out of reach until the nineteenth century.2 Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, the first woman to write a full-length history of England (and that limited to the seventeenth century), remained for a long time a lonely example of a female political historian. After hers, there is but one case before the nineteenth century of a full-dress history by a woman, Charlotte Cowley; unlike Macaulay's book, it was intended specifically for women rather than for the reading public at large.3 It is not my intention to dwell on this paucity, although a lengthier treatment of the questions raised herein would surely deepen our understanding of how women