Abstract
Reading Betty Miller’s 1958 essay ‘Amazon and Afterwards’ as a site of female correspondence, this chapter seeks to understand the ways in which the epistolary form can be a vital space for feminist practices. It contextualizes Miller’s essay among other letters written in the 1950s such as those by Edith Summerskill and Sylvia Plath.
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Notes
Betty Miller, ed., Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford: The Unpublished Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford (London: John Murray, 1954).
Anon., The Female Instructor; or, Young Woman’s Companion (Liverpool: Nuttall, Fisher and Dixon, 1911).
Anon., Etiquette for Ladies (London: Ward, Lock, 1900).
Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (London: Virago, 1990), p. 10.
Karen Payne, ed., Between Ourselves: Letters Between Mothers and Daughters 1750–1982 (London: Pan Books, 1984).
Virginia Woolf, Congenial Spirits: Selected Letters, ed. by Joanne Trautmann Banks (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. xi.
Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 56.
Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven, eds, Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 1.
Jenny Nasmyth, ‘The Wages of Freedom’, Twentieth Century, 164.978 (1958), 136–143, (p. 140).
Betty Miller, ‘Amazons and Afterwards’, Twentieth Century, 164.978 (1958), 126–135.
Jane Miller, Relations (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 83.
For a survey of the feminist politics of this period see Barbara Caine, English Feminism: 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Judith Hubback, Wives Who Went to College (London: Heinemann, 1957).
Barbara Wootton, Selected Writings, ed. by Vera G. Seal and Philip Bean (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).
Edith Summerskill, Letters to My Daughter (London: Heinneman, 1957), pp. 204–205.
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath (London: Faber, 1975), p. 220.
Jonathan Ellis, ‘Mailed into Space: on Sylvia Plath’s Letters’ in Representing Sylvia Plath, ed. by Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 13–31.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Burning the Letters’ and ‘Letter in November’, Collected Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1998).
Susannah Clapp, A Card from Angela Carter (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 10.
Anne L. Bower ‘Dear ---: In Search of New (Old) Forms of Critical Address’, in Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. by Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 155–169 (p. 156).
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ‘Giving Weight to Words: Madame de Sévigné’s Letters to Her daughter’, in The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Donna C. Stanton (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 96–103 (p. 99).
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© 2015 Lydia Fellgett
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Fellgett, L. (2015). Amazons and Afterwards: Correspondence as Feminist Practice. In: Hogg, E.J., Jones, C. (eds) Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497505_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497505_4
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