Edging Women Out

Before 1840 there was little prestige attached to the writing of novels, and most English novelists were women. By the turn of the 20th century, 'men of letters' acclaimed novels as a form of great literature, and most successful novelists were men. Here, Gaye Tuchman examines how men redefined this form of literary expression.

Before about 1840, there was little prestige attached to the writing of novels, and most English novelists were women. By the turn of the twentieth century, "men of letters" acclaimed novels as a form of great literature, and most critically successful novelists were men. In the book, sociologist Gaye Tuchman examines how men succeeded in redefining a form of culture and in invading a white-collar occupation previously practiced mostly by women. Tuchman documents how men gradually supplanted women as novelists once novel-writing was perceived as potentially profitable, in part because of changes in the system of publishing and rewarding authors. Drawing on unusual data ranging from the archives of Macmillan and company (London) to an analysis of the lives and accomplishments of authors listed in the Dictionary of National Biography, she shows that rising literacy and the centralization of the publishing industry in London after 1840 increased literary opportunities and fostered men’s success as novelists. Men redefined the nature of a good novel and applied a double standard in critically evaluating literary works by men and by women. They also received better contracts than women for novels of equivalent quality and sales. They were able to accomplish this, says Tuchman, because they were to a large extent the culture brokers – the publishers, publishers’ readers, and reviewers of an elite art form. Both a sociological study of occupational gender transformation and a historical study of writing and publishing, this book will be a rich resource for students of the sociology of culture, literary criticism, and women’s studies.

Annotation Writing from positions of cultural exclusion, women have faced constraints not only upon the "content" of fiction but upon the act of narration itself. Narrative voice thus becomes a matter not simply of technique but of social authority: how to speak publicly, to whom, and in whose name. Susan Sniader Lanser here explores patterns of narration in a wide range of novels by women of England, France, and the United States from the 1740s to the present. Drawing upon narratological and feminist theory, Lanser sheds new light on the history of "voice" as a narrative strategy and as a means of attaining social power.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Their Fair Share identifies and contextualises many previously unknown critical writings by a selection of well-known turn-of-the-century women. It reveals the networks behind an influential journal like the Athenaeum and presents a more shaded assessment of its position in the field of cultural production, in the period 1870-1920. The Athenaeum (1828-1921) has often been presented as a monolithic institution offering its readers a fairly conservative, male oriented appreciation of a wide variety of contemporary publications. On the basis of archival and biographical material this book presents an entirely new analysis of the reviewing policy of this weekly from 1870, when it came into the hands of the politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, up to and including 1919-1920 when John Middleton Murry became its editor. Dilke, and his editor Norman MacColl, are here revealed to have been committed feminists who enlisted some of the most influential women of their time as critics for their journal. The book looks more specifically at the contributions by, a.o., Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Emilia Dilke, Jane Harrison and Augusta Webster.

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry. Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.

This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of 'the woman question' in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, 'Ouida' and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.

This study will be a key resource for scholars, teachers, and students in British literary studies, women's studies, and cultural history.--Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania "Internet Review of Books"