Johnson's Lessons for Men: Producing the Professional Woman Writer

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Mandell
Keyword(s):  
Woman Writer ◽  
Professional Woman

scholarly journals Quixotic Legacy: The Female Quixote and the Professional Woman Writer

Authorship ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi L. Wyett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Professional Woman ◽  
The One

This essay argues that Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or, The Adventures of Arabella (1752) served as a fulcrum in eighteenth-century literary history by providing a figuration of the female quixote for subsequent women novelists who were keen to court absorbed readers on the one hand while countering stereotypes about women's critical failings on the other. The figure of the female quixote proves to be a significant mark of literary professionalism by reifying the spectre of the professional writer’s need for absorbed readers and dramatizing the occasion by which the woman writer demonstrates her own authority, paradoxically allowing both woman novel reader and woman novel writer to lay claim to intellectual authority. Ultimately, the main character Arabella's fictional model potentially echoes more actual eighteenth-century women’s experiences than her adventures at first suggest: the female quixote emerges as less a social outcast or a freak than a figure for women’s commonality, especially their intellectual and ethical ambitions in a world inimical to their interests.

Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and the Rise of the Victorian Woman of Letters

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-483
Author(s):  
Iain Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
Professional Woman ◽  
The Relationship

This essay revisits a public dispute between Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens during the winter of 1855–56. It argues both that the nature of their quarrel has been largely misunderstood and also that its wider implications for understanding nineteenth-century intellectual and literary culture have been overlooked. The essay thus reexamines the dispute, its origins, and its aftermath, and places the event within the context of recent critical readings of Utilitarianism, the experience of industrial society, and the emergence of the professional woman writer. In so doing, it shows that a deeper exploration of the relationship between Martineau and Dickens adds considerably not only to our knowledge of the two authors themselves but also to our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century intellectual history interacts with the gender politics of Victorian literary culture and publishing.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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