The politics of writing: Julia Kavanagh, 1824–77 by Eileen Fauset

Author:Eileen Fauset [Fauset, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Essays, Social Science, Women's Studies, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9781847795267
Google: vXa5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T03:35:37+00:00

4

French Women of Letters and English Women of Letters

French Women of Letters and its companion volume, English Women of Letters, are Kavanagh’s testimony to the progress and achievements in women’s writing during the previous two hundred years. Both volumes were published in 1862, twelve years after Woman in France during the Eighteenth Century, and, as she states in her preface to English Women of Letters:

Both are parts of one whole, conceived and written at the same time, and with the same object – namely, ‘to show how far, for the last two centuries and more, women have contributed to the formation of the modern novel in the two great literatures of modern times – the French and the English.’

Women’s lives, and women writers particularly, never ceased to fascinate Kavanagh. She believed wholeheartedly that the novel was an important means of expression for women; as she states in the final paragraph of English Women of Letters, ‘It is the only branch of literature in which women have acquired a genuine distinction and exercised undoubted influence’. She maintains that during the past two hundred years the French novel has held precedence in Europe as the most popular, adding that it may have been abused, even hated, but it has always been read.1 The English novel, she claims, is less universally fascinating but more durable. She attributes a change in the novel over the previous seventy years or so to the influence of women who, she implies, extended a sense of ‘truth’ in the telling of a plain tale. To this end she applies the term ‘delicacy’. In the context of the mid-nineteenth-century concept of sexual difference, Kavanagh makes it clear that in her regular usage of this term she is, in fact, addressing the literary developments that took place during the period about which she was writing. In Writing Women’s Literary History (1996) Margaret Ezell notes that ‘Between 1675 and 1875, there were at least twenty-five biographical encyclopedias and anthologies specifically devoted to chronicling the lives and labours of literary Englishwomen’, all of which establish an ideology of the ‘feminine’.2 She reminds us that in Kavanagh’s literary history the term ‘delicacy’ had evolved from earlier eighteenth-century usage to represent ‘the primary standard of literary merit for women writers’. However, she contends that in English Women of Letters, Kavanagh ‘faces the charge that nineteenth-century novels suffer from overrefinement because of the domination of female authors’. And, as such, she maintains that Kavanagh ‘turns to the history of the novel seeking solutions’.3 I would suggest that Ezell’s argument is too reductive in that it fails to accommodate a wider understanding of Kavanagh’s purpose. Though Kavanagh’s perspective is one of gender difference, she does not singularly reflect a historically received allegiance to the ideal of ‘feminine’, as Ezell suggests, but also determines a political position. By the end of the eighteenth century, delicacy of tone in women’s writing had become the accepted norm.4 Kavanagh utilises the word in terms of understanding women’s contribution to the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.