Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Princeton University Press (1977), Edition: Revised, Paperback, 378 pages
Description
When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today. This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.
User reviews
LibraryThing member bjmitch
During a heat wave you would think I'd be reading something light and "beachy" but no, I've been reading this serious critical look at British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing from a feminist point of view. This is a revised and expanded edition of her original book published in 1977 I
Those early women novelists were admirable, strong women. With all the restrictions on their education and lifestyle, they still managed to write novels that are widely read even today. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and all the other beloved novels they wrote have much of value to say to we modern women with all our freedoms. Just think, they had little or no education, were only trained to catch a man, hopefully a rich one, and had no knowledge of the life of anyone other than people just like themselves. Most of us would go stark raving mad with all their confining rules. Their fathers and then husbands had total control over them, even over what they were allowed to read.
We get a slight taste of this kind of life watching series on Masterpiece Theater, but the girls in those families are sly enough to find ways around the men in their lives. I doubt most women in 19th century English upper classes could get away with such things.
Showalter, a Princeton professor, wrote this book as a result of an academic study of all the women novelists in England and this is a book that could easily be used as a textbook. That is not to say that it is dry and boring, anything but. I found it very readable and fascinating, enough so to read it through a week of terrible heat and humidity. Now I'm going on to something very light, but this book told me not only about the writing these women did, but nearly every aspect of their lives. The addition of novelists of the modern day through Doris Lessing is a small part of the overall book.
The feminist aspects of the book are enlightening as well, and Showalter includes much about the suffragists' struggle for the vote and against war. I confess this was the least interesting part to me, but I must admit that it would be impossible to separate the feminist movement from English women's literature since each was influenced greatly by the other.
I recommend this book but not to everyone. If you are interested in women's history or the early English women novelists, you will enjoy this study. Otherwise, you'll do better to stick with the actual novels, but don't let yourself be misguided in the thought that 19th century novels will be boring. You'll miss some excellent reads.
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believe.Those early women novelists were admirable, strong women. With all the restrictions on their education and lifestyle, they still managed to write novels that are widely read even today. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and all the other beloved novels they wrote have much of value to say to we modern women with all our freedoms. Just think, they had little or no education, were only trained to catch a man, hopefully a rich one, and had no knowledge of the life of anyone other than people just like themselves. Most of us would go stark raving mad with all their confining rules. Their fathers and then husbands had total control over them, even over what they were allowed to read.
We get a slight taste of this kind of life watching series on Masterpiece Theater, but the girls in those families are sly enough to find ways around the men in their lives. I doubt most women in 19th century English upper classes could get away with such things.
Showalter, a Princeton professor, wrote this book as a result of an academic study of all the women novelists in England and this is a book that could easily be used as a textbook. That is not to say that it is dry and boring, anything but. I found it very readable and fascinating, enough so to read it through a week of terrible heat and humidity. Now I'm going on to something very light, but this book told me not only about the writing these women did, but nearly every aspect of their lives. The addition of novelists of the modern day through Doris Lessing is a small part of the overall book.
The feminist aspects of the book are enlightening as well, and Showalter includes much about the suffragists' struggle for the vote and against war. I confess this was the least interesting part to me, but I must admit that it would be impossible to separate the feminist movement from English women's literature since each was influenced greatly by the other.
I recommend this book but not to everyone. If you are interested in women's history or the early English women novelists, you will enjoy this study. Otherwise, you'll do better to stick with the actual novels, but don't let yourself be misguided in the thought that 19th century novels will be boring. You'll miss some excellent reads.
Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked.
(Virginia Woolf, "Professions for women" (1931), in The death of the moth)
The point Showalter keeps coming back to in her discussion of women novelists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain is how what women could write about was constrained by their own upbringing, social norms and — above all — the prejudices of (real or imaginary) male readers. She sees this active or passive censorship (vividly dramatised by Woolf in her famous lecture) as the thing above all others limiting the literary achievement of women during this period. Geniuses like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were able to circumvent it to some extent by using non-explicit techniques to get their message across, but for most writers it meant at least a fudged ending to their stories, if not an abject surrender to convention. There was almost a breakthrough with the sensationalist writers of the sixties and seventies (Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the many imitators of her bestsellerLady Audley's secret), and Showalter has obviously had a lot of fun rediscovering their work. But she finds that they didn't quite have the nerve to push things as far as they might have, and were overtaken by the political campaigning literature around the turn of the century, which Showalter finds of little literary interest, being so concerned not to distract attention from the Suffrage issue by offending other sensibilities.
She moves on to looking in some detail at the "aesthetic" writers of the post-1914 period, Katharine Mansfield (who probably shouldn't be here, being neither British nor a novelist, but never mind...), Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. There's a valuable, detailed look at both Richardson, whom Showalter clearly admires, even though she was writing herself into something of a dead end, and Woolf, whom Showalter finds it very difficult to like. Showalter likes Woolf as a critic and essayist, and points out how her mental health problems could be related to the way she was discouraged from relating properly to her own femininity by her father, husband and sister. However, she can't help finding most of Woolf's fiction limited, prejudiced and irrelevant to the feminist cause. Perhaps she'd have seen this differently a decade or two further on, but in the world of the early seventies she certainly wasn't alone in this. (The arguments here reminded me a bit of what John Carey says about writing and class in The intellectuals and the masses, for instance.)
Looking at her own time, Showalter doesn't attempt a complete survey of British women's writing, but focusses on a small number of writers whom she considers relevant to both the development of the literary tradition they inherited and the advance of feminism, in particular Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble. I wouldn't argue with that, but it does mean that some important (in hindsight) writers like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark only get mentioned in passing. And of course there's a big gap in the middle of the century Showalter doesn't look at at all — from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Rebecca West to Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, it's radio silence. And what happened to Angela Carter? — surely Showalter ought to have known about her at the latest by the time of the revised 1982 edition?
Also missing, as Showalter acknowledges, is any reference to working-class authors. Obviously there weren't many working-class women writing novels in the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s there would have been a few to choose from: Jessie Kesson would be an obvious example, or the Manchester socialist novelist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Neither make it into Showalter's otherwise very interesting and useful Biographical Appendix.
A bit of a period piece, then, but it made me more interested than I expected to be in obscure nineteenth century novelists — a few more names have been added to the reading list!
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The consciousness of — what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. (Virginia Woolf, "Professions for women" (1931), in The death of the moth)
The point Showalter keeps coming back to in her discussion of women novelists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain is how what women could write about was constrained by their own upbringing, social norms and — above all — the prejudices of (real or imaginary) male readers. She sees this active or passive censorship (vividly dramatised by Woolf in her famous lecture) as the thing above all others limiting the literary achievement of women during this period. Geniuses like George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were able to circumvent it to some extent by using non-explicit techniques to get their message across, but for most writers it meant at least a fudged ending to their stories, if not an abject surrender to convention. There was almost a breakthrough with the sensationalist writers of the sixties and seventies (Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the many imitators of her bestsellerLady Audley's secret), and Showalter has obviously had a lot of fun rediscovering their work. But she finds that they didn't quite have the nerve to push things as far as they might have, and were overtaken by the political campaigning literature around the turn of the century, which Showalter finds of little literary interest, being so concerned not to distract attention from the Suffrage issue by offending other sensibilities.
She moves on to looking in some detail at the "aesthetic" writers of the post-1914 period, Katharine Mansfield (who probably shouldn't be here, being neither British nor a novelist, but never mind...), Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. There's a valuable, detailed look at both Richardson, whom Showalter clearly admires, even though she was writing herself into something of a dead end, and Woolf, whom Showalter finds it very difficult to like. Showalter likes Woolf as a critic and essayist, and points out how her mental health problems could be related to the way she was discouraged from relating properly to her own femininity by her father, husband and sister. However, she can't help finding most of Woolf's fiction limited, prejudiced and irrelevant to the feminist cause. Perhaps she'd have seen this differently a decade or two further on, but in the world of the early seventies she certainly wasn't alone in this. (The arguments here reminded me a bit of what John Carey says about writing and class in The intellectuals and the masses, for instance.)
Looking at her own time, Showalter doesn't attempt a complete survey of British women's writing, but focusses on a small number of writers whom she considers relevant to both the development of the literary tradition they inherited and the advance of feminism, in particular Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble. I wouldn't argue with that, but it does mean that some important (in hindsight) writers like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark only get mentioned in passing. And of course there's a big gap in the middle of the century Showalter doesn't look at at all — from Ivy Compton-Burnett and Rebecca West to Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, it's radio silence. And what happened to Angela Carter? — surely Showalter ought to have known about her at the latest by the time of the revised 1982 edition?
Also missing, as Showalter acknowledges, is any reference to working-class authors. Obviously there weren't many working-class women writing novels in the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s there would have been a few to choose from: Jessie Kesson would be an obvious example, or the Manchester socialist novelist Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Neither make it into Showalter's otherwise very interesting and useful Biographical Appendix.
A bit of a period piece, then, but it made me more interested than I expected to be in obscure nineteenth century novelists — a few more names have been added to the reading list!
Show Less
LibraryThing member AmaliaGavea
An exquisite volume of essays about some of the most prominent, and also, some of the most obscure, British women writers. What makes this work so special is the way Elaine Showalter presents her chosen writers. Many times, we see them through the eyes of a fellow writer. It was refreshing to see
The only element I would classify as ''negative'' is the language Showalter uses. It is beautiful and fascinating for scholars and for us who are accustomed to essays about Literature and Female Studies, but I think it would be slightly difficult for the casual reader to really absorb it or even understand it at some point.
The work continues in a second volume by Elaine Showalter called A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx , where we are able to look upon American women writers.
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the views other women writers had for Charlotte Brontë or Virginia Woolf for example, and it was eye-opening to dive into the criticism these gifted women faced because they ''dared'' to break the chains of conformity. The only element I would classify as ''negative'' is the language Showalter uses. It is beautiful and fascinating for scholars and for us who are accustomed to essays about Literature and Female Studies, but I think it would be slightly difficult for the casual reader to really absorb it or even understand it at some point.
The work continues in a second volume by Elaine Showalter called A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx , where we are able to look upon American women writers.
Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1977
Physical description
378 p.; 8.75 x 1 inches
ISBN
0691013438 / 9780691013435
Local notes
literary studies
Similar in this library
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Professor Sandra M. Gilbert
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter