Introduction: Defining ‘Women’s Writing’; or, Writing ‘The History’

Abstract

Although scholars of literature are usually quick to claim for their own periods key originating moments, it is nonetheless safe to assert that the years 1750–1830 witnessed the first full flowering of women’s writing in Britain. Building on the success and popularity of earlier poets, novelists, playwrights, and philosophers, British women consolidated their significance as writers in the late eighteenth century; they created and supported movements (Bluestocking intellectualism, the call for abolition, new understandings of class, religion, and identity), initiated literary styles (the novel of sensibility, the historical novel, the elegiac sonnet, the hybrid ballad), and signalled transitions (from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from Romanticism to early Victorianism). The last twenty-five years of scholarship and textual recovery have overturned the convention that women wrote unambitiously, mostly anonymously, and concentrated on ‘feminine’ concerns like the family and the home. Instead, an understanding of the period which sees Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Jane Austen as only the more familiar of a host of writers has become standard. And as these previously marginalized writers have been brought back into notice, everything has changed: our understandings of literary history, and who did what when; our understandings of culture and the manifold relationships between writers and their societies; our understandings of not merely the limitations but the distortions of a canon that reads the development — the ‘rise’ — of the novel and poetry solely through a small cadre of male writers; even our understandings of Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Austen.