Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The construction of the woman writer
- 2 Remaking the canon
- 3 Women and the consumption of print
- 4 Women writing woman: nineteenth-century representations of gender and sexuality
- 5 Feminism, journalism and public debate
- 6 Women's writing and the domestic sphere
- 7 Women, fiction and the marketplace
- 8 Women poets and the challenge of genre
- 9 Women and the theatre
- 10 Women writers and self-writing
- 11 The professionalization of women's writing: extending the canon
- 12 Women writers and religion
- 13 Women writing for children
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The construction of the woman writer
- 2 Remaking the canon
- 3 Women and the consumption of print
- 4 Women writing woman: nineteenth-century representations of gender and sexuality
- 5 Feminism, journalism and public debate
- 6 Women's writing and the domestic sphere
- 7 Women, fiction and the marketplace
- 8 Women poets and the challenge of genre
- 9 Women and the theatre
- 10 Women writers and self-writing
- 11 The professionalization of women's writing: extending the canon
- 12 Women writers and religion
- 13 Women writing for children
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
No group of women, undistinguished by rank, unendowed by beauty, and known to but a limited circle of friends as unimportant as themselves have ever, I think, in the course of history – certainly never in this century – come to such universal recognition. The effect is quite unique, unprecedented, and difficult to account for; but there cannot be the least doubt that it is a matter of absolute fact which nobody can deny.
Margaret Oliphant's assessment of the Brontë ‘phenomenon’, written in 1897, was accurate. The sisters' reputation was as high fifty years after their deaths as it had been during their brief lives. The occasion of her tribute, a collection of essays by living women novelists writing on their deceased sisters, was a public recognition of an equivalent phenomenon. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: a Book of Appreciations, commissioned by the fiction publishers Hurst and Blackett, celebrated nearly a century of achievement by women writers. Oliphant had heralded the achievement much earlier, famously declaring in 1855 that the nineteenth century, ‘which is the age of so many things – of enlightenment, of science, of progress – is quite as distinctly the age of female novelists’.
Her comment, and the Hurst and Blackett collection, told only part of the story. To a prolific novelist like Oliphant, and to many less partial observers, women appeared to have appropriated fiction as their particular genre. What the remark did not acknowledge was the extent and variety of women's contributions to nineteenth-century literary culture in its widest sense.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Literature in Britain 1800–1900 , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001