Women Novelists Research Articles

Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes, and: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 by Deborah Weiss

Reviewed by: Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes, and: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 by Deborah Weiss Anne Chandler WOLLSTONECRAFT'S GHOST: THE FATE OF THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, by Andrew McInnes. London: Routledge, 2017. 198 pp. $155.00 cloth; $52.16 ebook. THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER AND HER AFTERLIVES: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, THE BRITISH NOVEL, AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF FEMINISM, 1796-1811, by Deborah Weiss. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 291 pp. $119.99 cloth; $119.99 paper; $89.00 ebook. Though methodologically different, Andrew McInnes's Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period and Deborah Weiss's The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 share the assertion that Mary Wollstonecraft, through her authorial personae and the posthumous remembrances of her husband William Godwin, acquired the status of an archetype that underwent revision in the fiction of other feminist writers. McInnes and Weiss each see "the female philosopher" as a conceit enabling successors to endorse aspects of Wollstonecraft's social critique while distancing themselves (and their novelistic heroines) from the taint of bohemianism Godwin inadvertently fostered following Wollstonecraft's death. Both authors find that women novelists of the Romantic period—Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and others—took care to distinguish between dangerous and safe forms of feminist philosophy and to re-shape Wollstonecraftian feminism into a gradualist, politically liberal enterprise. Whereas McInnes sees the trope as allowing subversive revisionings of feminism under the cover of separate-spheres ideology, Weiss emphasizes the gradual subsumption of Wollstonecraftian radicalism by that ideology, as later novelists assessed what women could realistically do within the still-protective framework of marriage. The two studies' tight focus on "the female philosopher" leitmotif is sometimes limiting. The coinage derives from recent scholarship rather than from direct usage by Wollstonecraft or her contemporaries. In spotlighting "the female philosopher" as a metonym for cultural anxiety about Wollstonecraftian feminism, McInnes and Weiss seek to provide a unified through line on a set of writers whose politics are difficult to classify. In both books, though, the term is in constant need of qualification, and one sometimes sees a gap between the metacritical and characterological levels of its application in chapters. McInnes begins Wollstonecraft's Ghost by historicizing the trope in two phases, first through earlier eighteenth-century understandings of the French Enlightenment's femme philosophe and the British bluestocking (each subject to feminist and misogynist inflections), and then through [End Page 161] 1790s debates over the French Revolution, whose early objectives Wollstonecraft defended as beneficial to women. In the British anti-Jacobin backlash of the middle 1790s, McInnes argues, "female philosophy" became aligned in simpler ways with Franco-and gynophobia. Always "a rhetorical figure" expressing ideological tension, "the female philosopher" now signified women who should be kept out of public life for their own and others' good (pp. 6, 11). Observing that any Romantic-era response to Wollstonecraft was affected by these phases of public discourse, McInnes describes "a Habermasian double bind" for early feminists: whereas the "literary public sphere" was open to them, the political one was off-limits despite a widespread belief that the two were contiguous in British culture (pp. 14-16). Inasmuch as Wollstonecraft attacked both "stereotypical representations of the female reader in literature" and "the related divisions between public and private spheres," later novelists were able to reference her "on a metatextual level" in modeling for their own readers what women's intellectualism should look like (p. 16). This case is best made in McInnes's first chapter, "Imagining Mary: Representations of Wollstonecraft in the Works of Mary Hays and William Godwin." Hays was a protégée of both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, so McInnes uses correspondence and incidental writings toward critical readings of Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1798) and St. Leon (1799). The dynamics between autobiography and political fiction in the novels are...

Sex, Sisters and Work: Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter and Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop

ABSTRACT In the 1790s, the writings of female philosophers such as Mary Wollstonecraft inaugurated the “rights of woman” debate, while in the 1890s, the New Woman emerged as a social and literary force. However, the fictions of these periods are seldom read alongside each other; the periodisation of literary studies has meant comparisons between these fictions of rupture and crisis have seldom been drawn out. This paper reads Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter (1799) alongside Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop (1888), arguing that Robinson anticipates the concerns of the New Woman novelists. Robinson’s exploration of the relationship between women and work presents work as a salve for bad marriages, but neither Levy nor Robinson can quite resolve the problem of female sexuality. In Levy’s novel, the sexually experienced woman is punished by death, while for Robinson’s heroines, entry into the public world of work inevitably carries with it connotations of sexual transgression. The Natural Daughter and The Romance of a Shop reveals continuity across a century of women’s writing: a persistent anxiety about the opportunities afforded to women beyond marriage in these twin periods of possibility that is by no means resolved in the fiction of the New Women.

‘I am the over-educated maid who must also earn a good living’: Exploring migration and sense of freedom among professional Indian women in Toronto

Since the mid-1980s, several Indian women novelists have enriched mainstream English literature with stories of educated, middle-class, Indian women migrating to and settling in North America. The novels assert that by migrating to North America, the protagonists were able to find ‘freedom’. In this paper, I question whether international migration necessarily leads to ‘freedom’ for this cohort of Indian women and argue that it their histories and experiences of subjugation and emancipation are not necessarily in binary opposition, and that there may be a space for multiplicity. Based on their changing power positions, the respondents were placed simultaneously at the centre and at the margins in their own homes, at work and at the places of socialisation.

Relocating Heteronormativity and Questioning Feminism: A Study in the Fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

A Critical Study of the Selected Novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni deals significantly with the post-feminist literature written by women novelists belonging to the Indian origin. She has delineated upon the thinking women of the Indian diaspora, whose mental faculty compels them to introspect their so long stereotypical status quo in the prevailing customs, traditions, myths, patriarchy, motherhood and marital life, that they have inherited or imbibed genetically to the alien lands far from their imaginary homelands. Due to literacy, technology, science, employment, migration, and the equal opportunities, economic independence, their sense of metaphysics has set equilibrium with their non-conventional discomfort zones and they have attempted to cross customized thresholds of comfort zones. They have advanced further from the set paradigms of women’s image which have been popularly prevalent from the historical perspective. the selected writings of the Indian – American diaspora woman author indicates that the dimensions of contextualizing in-betweenness, hybridity of thought in women’s personality and psyche have although been issues of conflicts and contradictions both in private and public space; however, they are more thoughtful to revamp and retrace their old-patterned trajectories for breaking the track of ice-ceiling. They have challenged fragile zones of both expectations and realities. Women characters in the novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Contemporary Indian-American Diaspora Woman Novelist) have been projected with the capacities of self-emancipation in their own negative and positive perspective; they represent the modus operandi of self-sufficient, self-independent and self-exploratory to emancipate their lives, although, in their quest of being free, they deviate. They acknowledge the fact of mutual understanding and acceptance of differences which are the metaphorical ways of resistance. They attempt to oscillate their self-disintegration and self-denigration. The selected novels discuss the double standards of society/community in terms of the expected standards and reality standards and that’s what makes sense in the author’s creative-writing scholarship that analytically, dexterously, meaningfully and emotionally brings out a contemporary critique on the choices, changes and commonalities confronted by women, against women, and for women. The author explores uncommon reoccurrences of gender existential needs, responsibilities and roles in order to demystify the stereotypical, sociological and psychological myths with regard to women’s thoughts and actions.

A Passionate Demonstration of Masculinity: New Men in New Woman Novels. Mary Ward’s Marcella (1894) and Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898)

Second-wave feminist critics dismissed the novels of Mary Ward as insufficiently feminist. As a consequence, her work remains under-read, despite recent promising signs to the contrary. This paper argues for a reconsideration of Ward’s New Women novels of the fin de siècle. In the period’s search for the New Man, Ward offers a nuanced and sensitive picture of an equal partner who accepts and appreciates the radical New Woman, and the inevitability of the changes she heralds.

Women Novelists and their Novels in the First Half of Twentieth Century

Women Novelists and their Novels in the First Half of Twentieth Century

On the Circular Structure in Bowen’s <i>The Death of the Heart</i>

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the few truly accomplished Irish women novelists and one of the most distinguished writers of her time during which she was born and lived with the Anglo-Irish naïve dignity and tragedy with the class declining and becoming insignificant. Through the reading of her representative “coming-of age” novel <i>The Death of the Heart</i> produced in the interwar period, the readers can perceive the influence of Bowen’s childhood experiences on her creation and her major Anglo-Irish religious and philosophical views of life. The purpose of this article is to focus on its circular structure that parallels the structure of the myth of the Fall, in which the heroine Portia is portraited as a Christlike figure who develops from an innocent and ignorant girl belonging to nowhere to an integrated and conscious individual after experiencing betrayal and the death of the heart’s innocence. By means of an ingenious manipulation of its circular structure and the portrayal of the Christlike figure Portia, Elizabeth Bowen demonstrates her lifetime of continual “shuttling between England and Ireland”, witnessing alternative conflict and compromise between England and Ireland, and her Anglo-Irish religious outlook of predeterminism: let it be and accept it as it is.

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON JANE AUSTEN AS A SUPREME MISTRESS OF COMEDY

Among the Victorian women novelists, Jane Austen ranks as a supreme mistress of comedy. Macaulay has boldly compared her with Shakespeare. (Dawson 78).She brought to her task of social comedy a singular combination of rare gifts- wit and satire of wonderful delicacy, a mind of great penetration, a style absolutely pellucid and effortless. No novelist has ever been more thoroughly an artist both in her attitude towards her own work and in her respect for her own limitations. She is so impersonal in her attitude that one may seek in vain for any trace of her own opinions or thoughts in her writings.

The Theme of Loss and Grief in Shashi Deshpande's Small Remedies

A writer throws light on the darkest aspects of life and motivates the reader by projecting the human realities through their fictional characters. Success and failure are the part of impermanent life. Have we ever tried to analyze the struggles and challenges behind one's failure and success? In a patriarchal society, women have to undergo multiple struggles and challenges and require an indomitable spirit to quench her thirst of success. It is highly important to analyze the psychology of women in her loses and happiness. As a woman novelist, Shashi Deshpande novels mostly centered on Women's lives and their challenges to survive in the Indian society. The female protagonist in Small Remedies has gone through several loses and grief beyond her success. Other women characters also built their strong identity after crossing all the barriers and awakening the collective consciousness.

The Conjure Woman’s Poetics of Poisoning in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

This article examines the poetics of poisoning in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. The article traces the depiction of the conjure woman in novels written by African American female novelists in the 1980s, drawing upon the figure’s historical implications in the black canon. Although Naylor’s novel introduces a number of conjure women, this article shifts the focus from the titular protagonist, Mama Day, to the other conjurer, Ruby, who casts a poisonous spell. Ruby’s spell is grounded in African American folklore and exemplifies Naylor’s re-situation of the conjure woman in a postmodern setting.

The Blame Game: War and Violence in Dilruba Z. Ara’s &lt;I&gt;Blame&lt;/I&gt;

Contemporary studies pertaining to the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh by South Asian women writers have ignited reinvestigation into the intensity of violence, rape and attribution of blame. Ethnicity based gendered violence in 1971 and the sudden shift in the attribution of the blame are some of the issues that have also been dealt with by a few Bangladeshi diasporic women novelists such as Tahmima Anam and Dilruba Z. Ara in their post-2000 novels written in English. Dilruba Z. Ara, a Swedish-Bangladeshi novelist, in her novel Blame (2015) emphasises that the blame game is a significant repercussion of war. Ara clarifies that Bengali people blamed Pakistanis for the 1971 genocide whereas Pakistanis blamed Bengali nationalists for not abiding by the Pakistani nationality. This novel, in the form of a Bildungsroman, is divided into three parts which narrate the journey of the female protagonist from the bondage of patriarchy towards a liberal life, her engagement in the war and her sexual victimisation in the same war. The mass killing of civilians, plundering of the country and victimisation of women do not end with the war; rather the blame game continues during the war resolution process. Courageous women in the war such as Ara’s protagonist Laila and her friend Gita are blamed for their own victimisation. In the context of how the blame game became an important tool to nullify gendered violence in the 1971 war, the paper intends to reread Ara’s novel Blame.

The Great Female Unread. Romanian Women Novelists in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: a Quantitative Approach

The Great Female Unread. Romanian Women Novelists in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: a Quantitative Approach

Traumatized Voices in Contemporary Arab-British Women Fiction: A Critical Stylistics Approach

Despite the interest often shown by feminist-informed models of literary trauma in the linguistic properties of traumatized characters’ language, very little has been done in relation to the study of the linguistic mechanisms/strategies speakers adopt in narrating traumatic events. This article explores the linguistic and discursive mechanisms in feminist trauma narratives, with a particular focus on the trauma of exile in the diasporic writings of Arab-British women novelists. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the topic, critical stylistics is adopted to describe the hidden discursive mechanisms in the speech of trauma victims, and how these mechanisms affect both the way such unsettling experiences are narrated, and the extent to which the traumatic dimension of these stories is properly conveyed to readers and recipients. Trauma theorists (Caruth 1995, Rogers 2006) have often emphasized the ‘unspeakable’ nature of traumatic experiences – the way in which they exceed the boundaries of language and expression. Accordingly, our attention should not be directed to what these texts explicitly say. Rather, we should be alert to their silences, gaps, and breaks. In other words, we should be more concerned with how language operates, because it is the cracks and crevices in victims’ speech that the full impact of trauma is most likely to be discernible. In the case of Arab-British women writers, traumatic memories of home, the anxiety of exile, and the constant search for identity are all negotiated through language. By adopting such linguistic strategies as repetition and negation, the traumatized characters in the selected texts both point to their in-between subject position, and assert their alternative subjectivity as resistant to clear-cut compartmentalization.

Mrs. Meeke and Minerva

'Mrs. Meeke' was the most prolific novelist of the Romantic period, publishing twenty-four novels and four translations between 1795 and 1823, eclipsing Walter Scott's twenty-two titles. Yet until recently, scholars knew little about her, and she was misidentified for decades as 'Mary Meeke,' the wife of a Staffordshire vicar. It was not until 2013 that an article by Simon Macdonald conclusively revealed the author's actual identity as Elizabeth Meeke—not a respectable vicar's wife, but the scandalous stepsister of Frances Burney. Meeke published all her fiction with the infamous Minerva Press, which issued staggering levels of new fiction written primarily by women. Meeke's title-pages employed a complex system of authorship: some works carried her name ('Mrs. Meeke'); others were anonymous; a third strain employed the pseudonym 'Gabrielli.' As an author of numerous fictions forced to adopt a multifaceted persona, Meeke both represented and shaped the literary culture that the Minerva Press created for its voracious patrons. Examining the case of Elizabeth Meeke, my paper considers the ways in which women novelists found themselves continually inscribed, erased, and reinscribed in a volatile literary marketplace that has left little trace of them for posterity. The first part of the essay will analyze the publishing ecologies that shaped Meeke's career, while the second part considers Meeke's output and reception more closely, offering an account of the tropes and preoccupations that characterize a writing career spanning three decades.

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936&#x97;June 15, 2018

Nina Baym: June 14, 1936&#x97;June 15, 2018

Nubosidad Variable: Postmodern Feminism in Post-Transition Spain

Nubosidad Variable:Postmodern Feminism in Post-Transition Spain Joan L. Brown Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000) is one of Spain's most canonical contemporary authors, and her novel Nubosidad variable (1992) holds a special place in her oevre. Nubosidad variable is surpassed only by her masterpiece El cuarto de atrás (1978) in terms of scholarly attention (MLA Bibliography). It has captivated general readers as well as scholars: a bestseller when it appeared, it has remained in print for a quarter of a century. Nubosidad variable has also been translated into eight languages. The novel's appeal is readily apparent. It is a riveting, exquisitely crafted story of two fascinating Spanish women who reinvent themselves as they write to one another, set in the tumultuous years after Spain's transition to democracy. Critics have explored a number of the novel's techniques and themes, especially those associated with writing (Cruz-Cámara, "escritura;" Guardiola; Pérez-Magallón), feminine cultural symbols (Laffey; Pérez, "Structural") and womens' friendship (Almeida, Ferriol-Montano). As I hope to show, Nubosidad variable has even broader cultural significance. The novel inserts women into post-Transition history using tenets of postmodern, twenty-first century feminism. These precepts also illuminate the intellectual biography of this iconoclastic author. Nubosidad variable builds on its novelistic predecessors, illustrating Virginia Woolf's maxim that "we think back through our mothers if we are women" (79). Martín Gaite's novel first evinces and then surpasses the "reclaiming of women's stories" that characterized Spanish feminism in the novel from the postwar era through the end of the twentieth century. This trajectory began with censored novels of the 1940s and 1950s that depicted female subjects in stifling traditional environments, with novels such as Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945) and Martín Gaite's Entre visillos (1957). It accelerated after censorship ended in the late 1970s, with novels that showed women participating in both public and private spheres: examples include El cuarto de atrás, esther Tusquets's El mismo mar de todos los veranos [End Page 301] (1978) and rosa montero's Crónica del desamor (1979). By the end of the twentieth century, the focus on women's life experiences became frank and intimate: almudena Grandes's Las edades de Lulú (1989) and Lucía extebarria's Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes (1998) typify these stories of female protagonists in pursuit of their own desires.1 In the twenty-first century a resurgence of historical engagement, mirroring this preoccupation in the surrounding culture, produced novels such as Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2002) and Carme riera's La mitad del alma (2004). Even as Nubosidad variable encompasses the concerns of its precursors and contemporaries, it offers a wider lens on society than other women's novels of the nineties–a perspective that would not become widespread for more than a decade. Written during the immediate post-Transition years, it chronicles the zeitgeist from a female perspective, illuminating a period that is iconic and contested. Nubosidad variable actualizes Martín Gaite's humanistic view of gender, which advocated personal freedom. The novel reflects the same viewpoint as the two nonfiction books that interrupted its creation, a volume of feminist social criticism and a collection of feminist literary criticism.2 a recently recovered interview from the 1970s elucidates Martín Gaite's conception of gender–including a passing reference to performativity long before Judith Butler had introduced the term–and demonstrates that in this area as in others, she was an independent thinker whose beliefs persisted over time. The novel's seemingly disparate structural and thematic elements can now be seen to belong under the rubric of third-wave feminism. These include mutivocality, an emphasis on personal narrative, the rejection of doctrinaire theory, critiques of sociocultural and socioeconomic inequality, and an embrace of diverse modes of gender expression. Through its postmodern form and content, Nubosidad variable enacts present-day feminist tenets, presaging Chimamanda ngozi adichie's invitation (expressed through her celebrated title) to build a more inclusive world through gender equality: We should all be feminists. Inscribing Women into Post-Transition Spanish History...

History Repeating: Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in Mary Robinson's Vancenza and The False Friend

Mary Robinson’s first and penultimate novels, Vancenza (1792) and The False Friend (1799), both center on orphaned daughters, who appear doomed to replicate the fate of their fallen mothers. For Vancenza’s Elvira and The False Friend’s Gertrude, this replication involves incestuous desires; Elvira falls in love with her brother while Gertrude obsessively desires her own father, driving them both to madness and premature death. Furthermore, even the women who exist on the periphery of Elvira’s and Gertrude’s stories find that the romance plot is a delusive promise. A consideration of how The False Friend extends Vancenza’s bleak vision of the dangers of sexual desire sheds light on Robinson’s increasing disillusionment with the idea of romantic love and the institution of marriage and her attempts to devise a new script for female identity. In The False Friend, Robinson posits the independent woman as an alternative model of femininity, allowing a divorcee, Miss Stanley, to take the position of a scribe of women’s narratives. One hundred years before the New Woman novelists, Robinson rejects the marriage plot altogether and instead suggests a solitary life of the mind as a more fulfilling option for women.

Revising Hospitality

In the eighteenth century, “toadeaters” referred to dependents who flattered superiors; however, the term’s connotation fluctuates between an insult of the dependent for servility and a critique of the superior for abusive behavior. Viewing this relationship through the lens of hospitality, this article contends that the term raises concerns about the ethical obligations of hosts and guests and the role reputation played in building social hierarchy. Simple satires of the toadeater as dependent guest reveal a fear over social mobility while novels present a sentimental exposé of cruel hosts. The article argues that women novelists popularized toadeaters as a sympathetic character to push back against the satire of the dependent guest, draw attention to women’s precarious social standing, and seek improvements through more ethical hospitality exchanges.

Sevgili Arsız Ölüm ovvero l’Istanbul “periferica” di Latife Tekin

The article examines Sevgili Arsiz Olum (1983; Dear Shameless Death , 2001), the first novel by Latife Tekin. Considered one of the most original Turkish woman novelists, Tekin distinguished her writing in the 1980s by a specific representation of Istanbul and its cityscapes. I will illustrate how this novel was both aesthetically and politically conceived to reproduce the alienation of Anatolian rural migrants from an urban space and culture and their “peripheral” perspective on the city. I will focus on Tekin’s strategies of representing the city from women migrants’ points of view as a locus of feminine subordination, exclusion and alienation, both economically and morally, from urban space.

Margaret Paul Joseph, Jasmine on a String: A Survey of Women Writing English Fiction in India

The Indian literary-critical establishment has not produced many comprehensive surveys of women’s writing in English or any other language, for that matter, especially in the last decade and a half. What scholarship exists either focuses specifically on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings of Indian women in English or analyses the works of arbitrarily chosen post-independence female authors. Margaret Paul Joseph rightly identifies in this state of affairs a critical lacuna and Jasmine on a String is her attempt at offering, in part, a necessary corrective. According to Joseph, Jasmine approaches its subject matter from a unique point of interest: ‘My survey is based on what I call “the experience of India” rather than the “idea of India”’ (6). Joseph argues that this allows her to chronicle ‘the literature written in English by women in India, both British and Indian’ (2), and ‘track [hitherto neglected] signposts on the journey taken by women novelists who … wrote in English’ (1). To be included in her survey, Joseph specifies the following criteria: the women ‘should have lived in India, not just travelled for a time in the country; and they should be writing fiction about India in the English language’ (6). Joseph is convinced that ‘[l]ike the flowers that change with the seasons, women living in India have written English fiction that changes with the years, but always brings India to life’ (16). By marking ‘the development in technique, the changes in theme, the shift in perspective’ (8), therefore, Jasmine ultimately seeks to demonstrate that this ‘literature is worth reading as an indication of the evolution of Indian fiction’ (10).