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Women's Novels and the Femaleness of the Novel
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13109 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1987 |
4,439 Words |
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Margaret Anne Doody
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Dale Spender has two main points to make: that women were mothers of the novel (a genre not merely engendered of fathers), and that women writers and their novels have been systematically suppressed and ignored in the creation of literary histories. Both of these points seem broadly true, and both are related to a longer history than Spender proposes in her run-through of English novels by women from the Renaissance to the era of Jane Austen. It is a pity that Spender's contentions are not supported by a better and deeper book; her knowledge of the literature of the past seems unfortunately to be generally shallow and inaccurate, and she is not to be trusted in matters of fact. The subject should be treated again by someone who knows the material and does not write as if the knowledge were hastily acquired the day before yesterday. Spender supplies lists of books as if that were her only task, but apparently derives her information or her impression as to their contents from other histories of literature. It is an excellent idea to cite Julia Kavanagh's provocative and engaging history English Women of Letters (1862), but it is not cricket or kosher to rely on Kavanagh (or any other such historian) for description of a novel's qualities, or even of its plot. Had Spender read a greater number of the novels by the authors whom she discusses, she might have discovered some interesting continuities within women's fiction as well as further challenges to the conventional negative views of women's writing that she seeks to oppose.
Spender, like other contemporary historians of women's writing, is (more than she appears to realize) the beneficiary of past revivals of interest in women writers. Before the recent phase, dating roughly from the later 1960s and distinguished by strong critical writing as well as history-making, there were two major episodes of regeneration and rehabilitation of the women's tradition in English literature. One was late Victorian. At the time when women were working toward creating their own institutions of higher education, there was a strong attempt to bring the women's tradition into focus. Kavanagh's book belongs to this phase. After World War I came a renewed interest in women writers of the past, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1928) is a sympathetic register of this concern, an effect as well as a dynamic cause.
Making women's fiction available
Germaine Greer has said that the women's tradition is revived roughly every fifty years - the trick will be to ensure that it is not sent under again. In this respect, what is much more important than Spender's very transitory book is the series to which it points - the reprintings of novels by Routledge & Kegan Paul in the Pandora series of novels by women, works written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is of more value to read the women's works than merely to talk about them - even if the talk about them were much stronger and more enlightening than Spender can provide. Once readers have these books in their hands and on their shelves at home, these novels acquire their proper life, and are no longer to be treated as inane ghosts.
Most of us who studied English in the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom in the 1950s or 1960s were a little luckier than Dale Spender was in Australia, for we had heard of the names of many of the writers whom she cites as complete discoveries. Yet these were names tucked away in the notes, or dismissed in the summary sentence of also-rans that historians and annotators
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