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Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.

This chapter mobilises key nineteenth-century aestheticist motifs to render a Sapphic lesbian homoerotic in A Misalliance. Protagonist Blanche Vernon’s nympholepsy is related to the text’s sensual motifs and the intertextual matrix surrounding the ancient Greek poet Sappho. The novel’s early reception is reviewed, including comments by Frank Kermode and John Bayley whose gendered readings obscure the text’s symbolism. On the contrary—emblematic of contested narratives of lesbian sexuality, women’s writing and political subversion in Sapphic texts by Charles Baudelaire and Renée Vivien—Sappho becomes the intertextual springboard for the production of the aesthete. In addition to the sensual motifs of the novel, key behaviours of aestheticism are indicated across the intertextual arc between Brookner’s text and her aestheticist predecessors including Renaissance revival, the desire to live life as art, the homoerotic gaze, the backwards turn, a trans-generational homoerotic and the subversion of bourgeois utilitarianism and family life. The performance of the aesthete is staged across the rhetorical figure of metaleptic prolepsis as supplied by Thomas Bahti’s reading of Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative of metamorphosis with its contours of guilt, punishment, redemption, purification and blessedness. Reasserting women’s contribution to Romantic aestheticism, Brookner is read as both women’s writer and aesthete.

This chapter introduces the book at the centre of this study, a mammoth biographical dictionary of 453 world women published in Arabic in Cairo 1893-6 at Egypt’s government printing press; and its author, Zaynab Fawwaz, an immigrant from southern Lebanon to Egypt who wrote on gender politics in the press and also wrote two novels, a play and some poetry. The chapter places this book in the context of scholarship on gender politics, feminism, nationalism and anti-colonialism, and early feminist discourse in the Arab region and especially Egypt. In that context, the fin-de-siècle interest in ancient history – Pharaonic, Ptolemaic, Semitic – evident in Egypt’s and Arabic Ottoman publications, receives attention as it relates to Fawwaz’s outlook on women’s history.

In this chapter, I investigate the networks of women writers associated with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal through an analysis of its ledgers and correspondence files. I detail their contributions, writing locations, rates of remuneration and working relationships with the editorial staff in order to shed light on the role Chambers’s played in the emergence of the popular woman writer in the early decades of the Victorian era. I link the work of individual writers to the editorial policies and generic conventions of the journal, which constructed ‘modern’ women as key players in the popular literature movement, both as readers and writers. Chambers’s provided a venue for prominent women writers such as Anna Maria Hall to reach broader audiences than ever before and for up-and-coming authors, such as Dinah Mulock and Julia Kavanagh, to establish themselves in a burgeoning literary marketplace. Chambers’s also provided opportunities for many other amateur and unknown authors to pursue their craft anonymously without name or fame. Written in part by and for women, Chambers’s Journal, by the 1850s, became an important vehicle for debates on the ‘Woman Question’, bringing issues of female education and employment to a broad audience of artisan and middle-class readers.

Readers in the mid-eighteenth century were increasingly invited to translate their knowledge about the social extension of mind learned in the experience of theatre to ‘new’ prose forms of the periodical and the novel. Women writers in these forms found opportunity to present women as cognitive agents rather than affective vehicles. Four works by women serve to illustrate this case: Eliza Haywood’s The Dramatic Historiographer (1735), Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier’s The Cry: a new dramatic fable (1754), Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespeare Illustrated (1753-4), and Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-6). These printed prose works invoke memories of performance – the co-presence of the real bodies of audience and actors. But they often do so to claim the superior cognitive experience of the reader’s engagement through print with a fictional persona in the ‘mind’. The prose work is imagined as a repository of socially extended mind for its audience, an opportunity not only to recreate the experience of communal consumption of the artwork which theatre affords, but also to provide a more sophisticated form of narrative scaffolding. Distance and reflection are enabled by the absence of the performer’s body and the judicious authority of a framing narrator.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the 1832-60 time period in Great Britain, focusing on developments in the publishing trade that offered new openings for women writers to pursue literary careers. It also provides a chapter outline, as well as a discussion of methodology and current scholarship on women writers and the history of mass media.

Born in India in 1952 but raised in Warwickshire from the age of seven, Ravinder Randhawa operated under the radar of mainstream literary criticism. Well-known, however, within the Asian writing community, and to feminists, she was essential to the burgeoning British Asian literature. As a founder of the Asian Women Writers' Workshop, Randhawa not only wrote prolifically about the lives of British Asian women, but also fostered the careers of others, including Meera Syal. Her fiction, its focus on themes of generational difference, the domestic and economic exploitation of women, and the often dark comedy of women's lives, has been highly influential on the women authors who have followed. In order to explore the unique way Randhawa engages with British Asian identity, this chapter relies upon the theoretical ideas of gender critic Judith Butler, and also examines the extent to which it is more useful to consider Randhawa's writing in terms of gender rather than ethnicity.

In an approach that is closer to a work of creative writing than to conventional criticism, Poet Lindsey Alexander compares O’Connor’s and Plath’s reception as women writers. This essay is something of an anomaly in the collection since it relies on elements of the personal essay, asks more questions than it answers, and uses anecdotal evidence. However, we see it as an essential demonstration of the volume’s commitment to a broad reconsideration of O’Connor, which includes exploring how she affects current writers and their work and practices. Alexander examines O’Connor and Plath as a way to consider how female authors are received by a male readership and identifies several similarities between the two authors—who are rarely regarded in tandem—and one striking difference: the perceived masculinity of O’Connor’s violent subject matter and the assumed femininity of Plath’s subject matter. Alexander uses these two gendered designations to raise the question: why one and not the other? 

This chapter focuses on the way early modern women represented their own girlhoods, raising questions about where and how girls spoke in early modern texts and what kinds of cultural work their voices did. In contrast to the static, predominantly symbolic role that female children played on the public stage, female youth appears prominently in early modern autobiographies. Although mediated through the retrospective lens of adult memories, girls’ voices are accessible through women writers such as Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, Grace Mildmay, and Rose Hickman Throckmorton.

One aspect of Irish Catholic identity which has in the past often been overlooked is the experience of women. This was true not only for a male dominated-church, but also for a male-dominated society. The focus here is on two sets of women’s’ experience: nuns and women activists. The phenomenal growth of women religious in the ‘long nineteenth century’, helped to ensure the success of the devotional revolution. This was paralleled in the secular sphere by the role of women in cultural and political movements. It is argued that a particular female Catholic consciousness evolved in nineteenth-century Ireland which had mixed consequences for Ireland in the twentieth century.

Chapter two focuses on well-known Afro-Caribbean women writers, Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, who reside in the United States and make a significant contribution to “resistance culture.” Through narratives of return, Kincaid and Danticat challenge exploitative consumption and tourism in their literary works by exposing and utilizing the power that lies in the production of history. They do this by using their mobility and prominence in North American literary markets to inform potential tourists and fellow Caribbeans abroad of the injustices of the tourist industry that are rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism. Kincaid directly confronts and criticizes the tourist industry in her satirical essay/memoir A Small Place; while Danticat participates in and critiques the tourist industry with her travel guide/memoir After the Dance. They produce alternative travel narratives that resist the travel guide genre, which has historically defined “natives” (the other) outside of history, modernity, and humanity.

Indian Writing in English (IWE) today boasts of internationally renowned writers, both male and female. In comparison to the vast amount of critical work on contemporary women writers, the roots of Indian women’s fiction in English are still gravely understudied. The aim of this book is partly to fight that amnesia and draw some of the early works by women out from their long, undeserved eclipse.