The Woman’s Historical Novel

Abstract

Drawing attention to the absence of women in mainstream histories, Virginia Woolf suggested to the students of ‘Fernham’ in A Room Of One’s Own (1929) that they might ‘add a supplement to history’, adding with palpable irony that they should ‘call … it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety’.¹ In the imagined story of Shakespeare’s sister which forms the influential centrepiece of A Room of One’s Own, however, Woolf demonstrated the power of the imagination not just to supplement but radically to rewrite the ‘unreal, lop-sided’ history² she found in the works of historians like G.M. Trevelyan. A historical novel in miniature, Judith Shakespeare’s story of thwarted literary ambition, seduction, and suicide is a narrative of defeat which is echoed in many other novels in this period. In Rose Macaulay’s They Were Defeated (1932), for instance, the heroine Julian Conybeare, who can only love a poet rather than being one, is accidentally killed during a fight between her Cavalier lover and her Puritan brother. Historical fiction allowed women writers the freedom to re-imagine the unrecorded lives of women but it did more than that.