Women Writers, Emergence

Although one of the main topics of world literature has been romantic relations between women and men, until the last few centuries there were not many women authors. That fact reflects the status of women in most societies. Until the nineteenth century most women lacked sufficient education and leisure time to write. The concept of the artist defined the role as masculine. As cultures became industrialized and women increasingly were educated and as printing technologies were used to produce cheaper books and enlarge reading audiences, it became more possible for women to write. Women then produced some of the most popular novels in England, France, and the United States and became more visible as poets and playwrights.

THE ANCIENT WORLD AND THE EARLY MODERN ERA

There had been women writers in earlier cultures, but they were few and far between. Ancient Greece celebrated the poetess Sappho (sixth century bce) and her followers. The Romans had only a few women writers, including Sulpicia, who wrote at the time of the emperor Augustus. The German nun Hrosvitha (935–1032?) wrote plays in Latin in the Middle Ages, and in fourteenth-century Japan there were female court poets and diarists, including Gofukakusa in Nijo, who wrote The Confessions of Lady Nijo. The prominent role of noble women in the courtly discussions of the arts in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries initiated a tradition of French women writers, beginning with Marie de France, who wrote poetic lais, or verses. In the fourteenth century Christine de Pisan, the widow of a court secretary, became the first woman to make a living as a writer, authoring much lyric poetry and The Book of the City of Ladies, which recounts women's heroic deeds. In Italy noblewomen wrote religious verse in that era. At the same time in England the religious mystic Margery Kempe wrote her autobiography and another mystic, Julian of Norwich, wrote Revelations of Divine Love.

Only in the seventeenth century did women authors begin to become more prominent, developing the new literary form of the novel, though many still published their works anonymously. The first historical novel was written in France by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de la Fayette (1634–1693). Her novel, La Princesse de Clèves, was published in 1678. Seventeenth-century England saw the emergence of female writers such as Aphra Behn (1640–1689), who wrote the novel Oroonoko (1688) and the play The Rover (1677), and the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). The American colonies produced the poet Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672).

THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

In the eighteenth century the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) wrote the prose pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which made the question of women's rights part of public discussion. Wollstonecraft died giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851), who married the poet Percy Shelley and wrote Frankenstein (1818). Other English women novelists began writing in the early nineteenth century, including Fannie Burney (1752–1840) and Jane Austen (1775–1817). Like many female authors Austen published her works anonymously. Studying the social behavior and psychology of English middle-class characters, Austen wrote about their faults, foibles, and strengths, presenting a picture of English middle-class existence but also satirizing self-deception, pride, and false humility. Austen's first complete novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), argued for psychological balance among its well-off denizens. Her most successful and highly praised novel was Pride and Prejudice (1813), which examined the error of first impressions and the play between appearance and reality.

Women have excelled at writing novels from the nineteenth century to the present, and many have been poets as well. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), who wrote Jane Eyre (1847), and Emily (1818–1848), who wrote Wuthering Heights (1848) and Villette (1853), wrote poetry before penning novels. Like Austen, the Brontës wrote at home and published their novels anonymously, and like Austen's, their novels were successful. Jane Eyre, the story of an orphan girl who becomes a governess and eventually marries her mysterious employer, showed the vulnerability and good sense of single women. Wuthering Heights is a novel about passion and the irreconcilable differences between natural and civilized beings. Their contemporary, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880), was an influential novelist whose work, which focused on humble characters and the ebb and flow of history, inspired many later novelists. Eliot's works include The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871–1872). The United States had influential women novelists, including Harriett Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) sold more than 500,000 copies and was a catalyst in the antislavery movement. Her contemporary Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) wrote the children's novel Little Women (1868–1869).

Women authors of the nineteenth century also became important poets, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), who wrote the collection of love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and a long poem in blank verse, Aurora Leigh (1856), in which she considers the rights and virtues of women artists. Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) wrote lively, often sensuous poems that explored the meaning of life, such as "Goblin Market" (1862). In the United States, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), wrote more than two thousand poems, though she published only ten during her lifetime. Dickinson's poems were simple, intense, and witty treatments of issues such as passion, death, war, and the role of art.

Women authors began to emerge as acknowledged artists by the end of the nineteenth century and took their place alongside male authors as important, innovative creators and visionaries. The American story writers Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) contributed to the development of the short story genre and to an increasing interest in female characters as the focus of fiction. Gilman was also a social visionary, examining the problems of gender relations and arguing for increased political rights for women. The American novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) explored the ethical problems of middle-class Americans in novels such as Ethan Frome (1911) and Age of Innocence (1920), and Willa Cather (1873–1947), the author of O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), discussed the problems of expansion into the west. The French novelist Colette (1873–1954) wrote novels about the experiences of a rebellious teenager (Claudine Goes to School) as well as sensitive portraits of the difficulties of love in novels such as Gigi (1945). The South African novelist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), the Danish novelist Isak Dinesen (1885–1962), and the West Indian writer Jean Rhys (1890–1979) focused on colonial existence and race relations in Africa and the Caribbean. Rhys's novel The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) recounts the experiences of a character, Bertha, from Emily Brontë's Jane Eyre.

THE MODERN ERA

With the advent of literary modernism women authors came into their own as innovators. As they traditionally had, women writers tended to focus on the experiences and insights of female characters, domestic difficulties, and the social tragedy caused by wasting the will and talent of women. With modernist aesthetic experiments women authors could begin to develop their own lyrical modes of expression. Using imagery and subjective perspectives, modernist authors inscribed a different experience of the world through a lyrical language of the senses. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), who with her husband, Leonard, operated the Hogarth Press, wrote many novels whose style and insight made fiction into more than a description of characters and events. Both Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) present the lives of women protagonists as they experience the changes in life and times around them. Woolf also wrote important meditations on the status of women, including A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).

The experimentalist Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) produced novels and plays that used repetition, fractured grammar, and unusual word choices to convey the feeling of experience as well as its changes through time. She is best known for Three Lives (1909), which consists of elaborate verbal portraits of three women, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), in which she writes her own autobiography under the guise of her partner, Alice. Other modernist women writers include the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), the English novelists Rebecca West (1892–1983), Radclyffe Hall (1886–1943), and Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962); the American novelists Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), the author of Nightwood (1937), and Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960), the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); and the Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), whose 1922 novel Kristen Lavransdatter won the Nobel Prize. Short story writers include the American humorist Dorothy Parker (1893–1867) and the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923).

Modernism enabled women poets to become more prominent as literary cultures expanded to include women as active artists and literary theorists. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) wrote more traditional verse, poets such as Amy Lowell (1874–1925) and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961) developed the imagist style, and Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), and Louise Bogan (1897–1970) worked through more personal visions of language. Sitwell's poetry tended to be satirical, Moore's was wide-ranging, and Bogan's was tragic and personal. Although women had not begun to write many plays, Susan Glaspell (1882–1948) wrote Trifles (1916) and other plays for the Provincetown Players, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison's House (1930). Another American playwright, Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970), wrote Machinal (1928), a play about a young woman's destruction.

The emergence of women authors as full-fledged members of literary communities continued in the twentieth century. The middle of that century saw the emergence of writers such as the satirical novelist Muriel Spark (1918–2006) and the Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919–1999). In France women authors became important contributors to the literary scene. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), a student of philosophy, wrote an analysis of the status of women, The Second Sex (1949), and also wrote novels and an autobiography. Nathalie Sarraute (1900–1999) and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) contributed to the formulation of the nouveau roman, a French avant-garde form of the novel that dispensed with realistic plot and character in favor of subjective impression and the flow of events. Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) wrote surrealistic novels, and Lillian Hellman (1907–1984) wrote plays that showcased the human capacity for petty evil. Women short story writers also became prominent, including Eudora Welty (1909–2001), Tillie Olsen (b. 1913), and Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964).

Women poets came into their own in the second half of the twentieth century as Maya Angelou (b. 1928) became the American poet laureate, following a long line of innovative, accomplished poets. Those writers include the British poet Stevie Smith (1902–1971) and the Americans Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), Anne Sexton (1928–1974), and Sylvia Plath (1932–1963).

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS

The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a new generation of women writers to become more political and begin paying attention to the work of women of color. Mixing cultural analysis with lyrical verse, poets such as Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), Audre Lorde (1934–1992), and Judy Grahn (b. 1940) presented the pulse of feminist struggle. Novelists such as Alice Walker (b. 1944) and Toni Morrison (b. 1931) made central the experiences of black women. Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940) and Amy Tan (b. 1952) focused on the loves of immigrant Chinese women. The novelist and short story writer Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) and the playwright Cherrie Moraga (b. 1952) produced innovative writing detailing the experiences of Chicanas. The Canadian Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) considered the problems of impersonal societies, and writers from more recently postcolonial nations such as India, including Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940) and Anita Desai (b. 1937), wrote about the experiences of Eastern immigrants to Western countries.

In the second half of the twentieth century women writers such as the American Kathy Acker (1947–1997), the Canadian Nicole Brossard (b. 1943), the German Christa Wolf (b. 1929), and the Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) contributed to cutting-edge experimental forms of writing in works that were often political.

Women writers in the contemporary period produce everything from experimental and high art novels to bestsellers. The character of their work has changed conceptions of literature not only insofar as literature has become an integral part of the women's movement and has represented a different point of view but also as women's writing has broadened and enriched cultural possibilities for all people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DeShazer, Mary, ed. 2000. Longman Anthology of Women's Literature. New York: Longman.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gubar, Susan, and Sandra Gilbert, eds. 1996. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. 2nd edition. New York: Norton.

Kesselman, Amy; Lily D. McNair; and Nancy Schniedewind, eds. 2003. Women: Images & Realities, A Multicultural Anthology. 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

                                            Judith Roof