"Damned Scribbling Women": Austen, Bronte, Eliot, Woolf

Catalog description

Though it was the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne who complained about the invasion of women in literature, canonical British writers Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf also met opposition. Do these writers have anything in common besides overcoming opposition to become celebrated British female novelists of the 19th- or first half of the 20th century? Bronte dismissed Austen as "only shrewd and observant."Woolf wrote with insight and sometimes biting wit about each of the others in The Common Reader. Scholar Alison Booth compared two in the book Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. What might Austen have thought of the works that followed hers? Can we imagine an Austen novel in which she creates sisters based on Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf? How to compare the writers' journeys to popular and critical success? What narrative techniques do they have in common? What common themes? Characters? Settings? Symbols? In what ways does each distinguish herself? We will read the novels Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Eyre (1847) Adam Bede (1859), and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), along with excerpts from biographies, from the writers' letters and diaries, and from contemporary critical responses.