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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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 five also looks at women as cultural producers. Popular literature provided the mean by which Irishwomen could develop public reputations as novelists and playwrights. From the nineteenth century onwards Irish women such as Katherine Cecil Thurston and L.T. Meade were highly successful purveyors of popular fiction to an international market particularly in the US. They also promoted themselves as ‘Irish women writers’.

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.

Investigating the connections between Mansfield and von Arnim, as well as ways that they differed in the style, enables us to appreciate a diverse set of creative attachments that early 20^th century women writers made to the natural world. As Mansfield’s older cousin, von Arnim offered an example of a successful woman writer with her novel, Elizabeth in her German Garden. This essay finds an international set of gardens in the experience and writing of both authors, as well as sensitivity to gender, class and national attitudes reflected in garden settings. While Mansfield’s style was decidedly more modernist in its imagery and psychology, both authors constructed floral catalogues and used garden settings in characterisation, often to humorous effect. The two join other women writers of their era in their love of gardens, using references to flowers, and offerings of them, both to network and to express their regard for one another.

Chapter six focuses in particular on the programme of plays produced by the Gate theatre from its foundation in 1929 to 1960. It points to the mixture of popular and more challenging modernist productions presented in the Gate during these years. The diversity and range of work by women in this period has been overlooked until recently by Irish literary history. These productions were part of The Gate's diverse programme which indicates that theatre-goers were equally willing to attend plays by Dorothy Sayers, Anton Chekov and Eugene O’Neill and promiscuously mixed ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Chapter six also examines the Gate as a spaces of cultural and sexual dissidence in Dublin, suggesting a trace of an ‘other’ city, where both gender and other forms of identity were much more fluid than in official Ireland. The relationship between aesthetic and sexual freedom is a key theme in Irish writing in the post-independence period, but also an important point of intersection with both modernist and realist writing by women in the inter-war years. This chapter explores the paradox by which Christa Winsloe's ‘Children in Uniform’ could be performed on the Dublin stage in 1934, albeit to discretely subdued acclaim, but ‘Gone with the Wind’ could not be screened without significant cuts until 1968. Class and particularly the desire to control the cultural life of the working class is obviously key here, but analysis of Irish modernism in all its forms create a more complex picture. The permeability of the boundaries between high and low cultural forms and the processes of cultural exchange mediated questions of the ‘proper’ role of women in domestic, national and international contexts

This paper aims at investigating how Woolf influenced Ocampo’s literary production; it might be through Ocampo’s Testemonies or in her journal Sur. It also our aim to analyse how Ocampo divulged Virginia Woolf’s writings in all Spanish-speaking countries through translations, lectures, publications and especially through her passion in talking about Woolf. Through Ocampo’s gaze, Woolf’s image and writing was understood in a different way, which goes beyond the European’s boundaries. This relationship has contributed tremendously for both of them, as women writers and intellectuals of their time. Ocampo’s progress as a writer had a dramatic impact after meeting Woolf. Above all, Ocampo contributed immensely for spreading Woolf’s writings.

This chapter explores Woolf's antipathy towards institutional libraries. Woolf questions the usefulness of a traditional library for women due to entry refusal, hostile environments, and the dearth of material written by women held in library collections.

This essay appeared in Strange Plasma, and was originally read at a meeting of the Preston Speculative Fiction Group. It discusses the representation of female writers in literature, focusing specifically on female science fiction writers in modern literature. The essay provides an understanding of how social comment is foregrounded in science fiction and takes a close look at the historical relationship between science fiction and feminism.