Women’s Writing

Abstract

To grow up in the nineteenth century meant negotiating a culture that made gender the organizing principle of daily life, that divided work, education, clothes, colours, food, rooms, hobbies, even handwriting into male and female counterparts. Nineteenth-century women writers had a lifetime’s worth of work in engaging with the identity so insistently ascribed to them. So to teach courses on nineteenth-century women writers is not just to have a useful excuse for an Austen–Brontë–Eliot course (pleasant though that is); it is to read womanhood as it is constructed, contested, challenged, and reaffirmed, over decades and decades. It is to allow students to view marriage, patriarchy, motherhood, domestic management, illness, social networks, economic dependence, and political invisibility as the defining features of life. It is to inhabit a female character whose subjectivity misaligns with her culture’s dominant ideology, and to feel the mute desperation of having elements of one’s fundamental identity be unnameable and invisible. It is to imagine the point of view of the nineteenth-century female reader who wants her novel to offer a scenario of exhilarating escapism encased in a strong structure of reassuring convention. It is to try to imagine the labour of the female writer who needs to represent a complex lived reality within a language, and a culture, that did not easily accommodate it. To be a woman in the nineteenth-century meant, as Virginia Woolf noted, to be poor (1929, p. 28).