Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Wilkes Joanne;

Author:Wilkes, Joanne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

If articulated in a female voice, this commentary may have seemed an overt complaint against male self-centredness; coming supposedly from a man, it ostensibly defends male interests while allowing readers to register the underlying egotism.

Finally, and most importantly for this discussion, Mozley demystifies any overstrained sense of the differences between the sexes by pointing to the contemporary proliferation of female writers. She implies that this development represents a healthier situation than obtained in the past, when readers accepted isolated female figures with pretensions to inspired genius, while not crediting the sex in general with literary potential. But nowadays, she says, ‘women write under the ordinary uninspired conditions in which most men write, from no stimulus of genius, but mere exercise of reason and intellect, and the cultivation of such powers as they possess’: what represents progress, this suggests, is that women are now credited with ‘reason and intellect’. Hence ‘[t]he public now accepts many women amongst its authorized instructors without doubt, or cavil, or sense of wounded pride’, and if some of them may be ‘heavily sensible, and reasonably prosy’, then this fact simply ‘brings any woman into fair comparison with many highly esteemed authors of the sterner sex’. Therefore ‘it is a great advance in the popular estimate of women’s intellect, when they can write dull books with as complete and entire impunity as men can’ (436–7).

The opening up of writing as a career for women, a development Mozley locates in the nineteenth century, is also at stake in her article for Blackwood’s which deals with the governess’s reminiscences from the 1820s. In this 1868 article, ‘Clever Women’, Mozley’s ventriloquising of a male critical voice enables her to make confident claims for women, while taking account of traditional conservative attitudes.

Here in her male persona, Mozley initially endorses some conventional notions about the disadvantages of ‘cleverness’ in women, notions based on a belief in significant intellectual differences between the sexes. The article contrasts the ‘clever woman’ with the ‘ideal woman’: although the latter ‘does not reason’, because ‘her processes of thought are intuitive’, yet ‘we [men] bow to conclusions formed on no conscious data, with nothing like argument to back them, because in her own province, though she cannot reason, she is apt to be right’. But outside her own province, on questions of art, literature, politics, religion, and all public issues, she submits to masculine guidance. In contrast, ‘[c]lever women … throw intuition over and aim at logic’, cultivating the ‘analytical faculty’ – with the result that they lose the capacity to use instinct ‘to serve their personal needs’, and sacrifice the ‘subtle power’ of tact to ‘intellectual exercises’.23

23 ‘Clever Women’, 411–13. Most of the rest of the piece, nevertheless, asserts the advantages of women’s increasing access to writing, both as an occupation and as a means of earning a living. It expresses relief that far distant now are the days when Swift attacked learned women, and when people advised young women against ‘any exercise of mind’ for fear of discouraging potential marriage prospects.

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