At the 2008 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers conference (BWWC), Ann Cvetkovich, Susan Fraiman, and Susan Stanford Friedman presented the opening-night plenary panel devoted to mapping feminist scholarship’s current priorities and concerns. Conference participants reported being both intrigued and perplexed by the speakers’ seemingly bleak view of “women writers” as a useful scholarly category. This essay, conducted by the authors as a year-long email conversation, extends that plenary discussion. In addition to sketching the intellectual history of feminism within the American academy and assessing how Women’s Studies (broadly defined) engages with a host of pressing interdisciplinary concerns, the authors also revisit their discussion of what defines and justifies continued work on 18th- and 19th-century British women writers.

June 2010: Susan Fraiman is Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  Her publications in the area of gender and culture include Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (1993); Cool Men and the Second Sex (2003); and articles in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Feminist Studies, PMLA, and New Literary History.  She writes frequently on Jane Austen and is editor of the Norton Critical Northanger Abbey (2004).  Her thoughts about the “new” Women’s Studies are elaborated in South Atlantic Review (2008).  She is currently writing about marginal versions of domesticity (queer, post-traumatic, feminist, homeless, etc.).

June 2010: Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2009, she received the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies. She is the author of Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter, winner of the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies; Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D.; and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. She edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, and (with Rachel Blau DuPlessis), Signets—Reading H.D. A Special Issue on Comparison of New Literary History edited with Rita Felski has just appeared, and Contemporary Women’s Writing, an Oxford University Press journal she co-edits, won the 2009 award for Best New Journal from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Italian, Serbian, and Hungarian. She is at work on books on planetary modernisms and on migration narratives.

June 2010: Miranda M. Yaggi is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, specializing in the 18th- and 19th-century British novel and women writers. She is at work on her dissertation, "Architects of a Genre: Literati, Critics, and the British Novel's Critical Institution," which revises the traditional narrative that features print-journalism at the heart of the novel's "rising" professional institution and proposes, instead, to account for the early institution's heterogeneric and heteroglossic nature.

For nineteenth-century Protestant authors, the reign of Mary I (1553--1558) epitomized the horrors of a world in which Roman Catholics were in charge. Catholic Emancipation (1829) stimulated new Protestant anxieties about the threat to British stability posed by the nation’s Catholic residents -- and abetted by dangerously liberal Protestants. Protestant novelists and poets thus turned to the Marian persecutions, often by adapting narratives from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, to warn their audiences that violent martyrdom might well be on the brink of return.  In particular, their fictions staged a conflict between the treatment of Queen Mary’s body and the martyr’s body, especially the female martyr’s body: Mary I’s excessive passion for Philip of Spain and her false pregnancy emblematize the pathologies that underlie religious persecution and threaten English nationhood itself, whereas the injuries inflicted on the female martyr’s body testify to the universal truths of Protestant faith. As the article’s first section demonstrates, Victorian representations of Mary I and her body frequently originate from the work of the Catholic historian John Lingard; even Evangelical visions of Mary draw heavily on Lingard’s and Agnes Strickland’s accounts of a virtuous but ultimately frail Queen. But for Protestants, this sentimental Mary threatens the nation through her perverse sexuality and equally perverse religious obsessions.

            The second half of the essay turns to the role of the popular martyr Rose Allin in novels by Anna Eliza Bray and Emily Sarah Holt.  Allin’s resistance to torture suggested how heroic women could counteract the moral threat posed by the queen’s weakness.

Bluestocking Catherine Talbot is now perhaps best known as the closest and most “angelic” friend of the learned Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, poet, translator, and prolific letter-writer. But Talbot’s literary afterlife as a relatively marginal figure in Carter’s illustrious career is hardly accidental. Hers are the only letters placed alongside Carter’s in the volumes published by Montagu Pennington after Carter’s death, and yet she is introduced to us (and remains throughout) Carter’s “deceased friend.”  The letters chart her painful decline and then repeatedly eulogize her after death, keeping her memory alive. Though the letters are obsessed with Catherine Talbot, living and dead, Talbot’s is always a voice from the past, from memory, from the margins, and that voice serves an important function: it becomes a way for Carter to represent the unrepresentable, death.

Rebecca West was a protean artist (author of, among other works, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1941]), a leading public intellectual, and a visionary commentator on the twentieth century. This paper shows the connection between her major philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas and her attitude towards exile. Following a brief historical overview of the main kinds of responses to the state of exile, from Ovid’s laments to modernist celebrations, I document Rebecca West’s fear of exile, so powerful that it could override even her dominant philosophy of process, her revisionist thinking, and her love of metaphor. Twentieth-century artists and thinkers tended to associated the state of exile with heightened artistic creativity, linking it with epistemological “privilege” (Simmel), or seeing it as instrumental to self-invention (Olsson). For West these ideas were not acceptable. Her patriotism, determinism, existentialism, and essentialism combined with her encounters with refugees during the 1940s and the 1950s to bring about a powerful conviction regarding the misery of exile, one that challenged other parts of her own belief system.

Through readings of contemporary medical accounts of shell shock alongside Dorothy L. Sayers’ (1893--1957) popular detective novels, this essay argues that through the character of Peter Wimsey, a veteran of the World War I and a survivor of shell shock, Sayers not only participates in the creation of a new kind of male literary protagonist, distinguished by his vulnerability rather than virility, but also intervenes in a contemporary debate about the place of a shell-shocked soldier in post-war society. While the medical literature aligned the doctor, detective, and policeman against the soldier, shell shock victim, and criminal, Sayers exposes and revises the implied alignment of shell shock and criminality, using shell shock as the pre-condition for the creation of an empathic, flawed, and profoundly modern detective in a traumatized and diminished post-war England.

This essay explores one version of a recurring pattern in the Victorian novel, the tendency to compare English and French models of national character. While many novelists, including Charlotte Brontë, portray French women as possessing an immoral theatricality, and deploying deceptive “public” personae that contrast with the Englishwoman’s devotion to her national and domestic homes, Brontë’s Villette endows French theater with the power to question British national gender ideals.

The special issue of Partial Answers devoted to British women writers is organized around the theme of marginalia, a concept that shifts attention away from the commonplace critical understanding of “margin” as merely an indicator of status and toward the intellectual work that occurs within it. The relation of “margin” to “center” articulates the position that women authors have historically occupied vis-à-vis a male tradition of literary creation; however, the margin is also a space of possibility that invites women authors to enter into an intellectual exchange with this tradition and to generate their own responses to it. The introduction surveys the essays collected in the issue as reflecting in different ways on the complex literary and discursive effects of women’s liminal locations.

This paper shows that Frances Burney used language and interaction features in the dialogue of her novels to indicate the moral worth of some of her characters. It also shows how Burney’s linking of language and morality allowed her to contribute to stimulating contemporary debates in which three major discourses of the enlightenment intersected: philosophical debates relating to the nature of goodness; consideration of the functions of language, in particular its potential to represent or govern morality; and discussions of the efficacy of spoken language in conversational contexts. 

In Frances Burney’s novels the criteria by which people should be judged are not so much social as moral, and her heroines are located in ethical spaces where predatory opportunists, pretentious egoists, and violent oppressors are to be recognized and spurned.  But recognition is not always easy, and sometimes polish and rank can mask unsavoury motives. Conduct books rarely tackled the complex issue of detecting pretence; nor did they offer a nuanced understanding of more complicated and therefore more demanding social contexts. Burney’s novels address such omissions, providing narrational schemata for working through diverse situations and relationships, through the various difficulties which the heroines encounter in their educative process. For Burney, speech is the index of morality, offering a reliable code to read an individual’s qualities and principles, beyond background, education, and gender. Making flexible use of modern linguistics, this paper shows how Burney encodes interiority in dialogue to signify moral marginality.

The essay argues that typical readings of Smith as a poet writing in a traditional Romantic mode, creating lyrics that depict a melancholic individual subject drawing inspiration and education from the natural world, risk marginalizing her. Recognizing exile as both biographical reality and literary trope is central to an understanding of Smith’s verse, for she also wrote poetry with a significant political agenda, one that distinguishes her from her early Romantic contemporaries and challenges the parameters of English Romantic nationalist discourse.