Women and Genre

This essay canvasses women’s practice over the nineteenth century of the three most prominent creative literary genres: fiction, poetry, and drama. It also discusses more briefly some of the many other genres with which women writers engaged – children’s literature, life-writing, and history – and highlights too women’s contributions to periodicals and magazines. It turns first to fiction, however, as this became the dominant creative genre over the nineteenth century and was especially notable for the achievements of women.

In 1810, the established writer Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) edited a compendious collection of British fiction, comprising 50 volumes and 21 writers. In her introduction, an erudite essay entitled ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, Barbauld signalled fiction’s cultural importance as a genre which everyone who could read, did read. Paraphrasing a saying about how the ballads of any nation had more impact on it than its actual laws, Barbauld declares, ‘Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems’ (Barbauld 1810/2002, 416–7).

One notable aspect of the collection was that eight of the novelists included were women: Frances Brooke, Charlotte Lennox, Clara Reeve, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth. In 1810, too, Radcliffe, Burney and Edgeworth all still had some years of writing ahead of them. By happenstance, Barbauld’s end-date meant that she just missed the emergence of the British woman novelist now most associated with the early nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, would appear in 1811.

The cultural influence of novels that Barbauld points to here would escalate over the next century. The industrial revolution produced major technological advances in publishing, and these, aided by the end of taxes on paper (in 1861), meant that books could be published in exponentially larger numbers and at ever-diminishing cost. In addition, with the expansion of education, there was an increasingly literate public to read them. Fiction could appear in instalments, either in separate part-publication or in magazines, and might also be borrowed from libraries. Even when fiction in volume form was expensive to buy (the standard cost of a three-volume novel was 31s 6d), it could be had much more cheaply from the circulating libraries. These existed at the time of Barbauld’s edition, but they burgeoned over the rest of the nineteenth century.

Many of the novelists who emerged during that century were women. Jane Austen, in fact, would not become especially prominent till long after her death; she is relevant here because of a famous defence of fiction that appears in the fifth chapter of her novel Northanger Abbey. This was published posthumously in 1817, but had been written in the early years of the century. Despite the fact that the productions of novelists, the narrator declares, ‘have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried’. Moreover, she goes on,

while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens,—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

(Austen 1817/2002, 59)

The writers whom Austen pits here against these mediocre compilers are female novelists, as she lauds the achievements of Fanny Burney (1752–1840) and Maria Edgeworth (1768–1851):

Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda […] some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

(Austen 1817/2002, 60)

A few years later, novelist Mary Brunton (1778–1818) was to remonstrate against the habit of valorising over fiction the genres of epic and tragedy, asking, ‘Does not a novel admit of as noble sentiments – as lively description – as natural character – as perfect unity of action – and a moral as irresistible as either of them’? (Mandal 2015, 20).

The reason that both Austen and Brunton write so trenchantly about fiction is that novels in their period were often treated as an inferior form of writing, seen as trivial at best, if not as immoral in its potential to create delusions, or to arouse dangerous sexual feelings among readers – readers who were assumed to be mainly women. By contrast, history, epic, and tragedy were understood to be genres written and read by men. The very growth of fiction, which began in the 1780s and never abated throughout the nineteenth century, also attached to the genre the negative connotations of mass production – the churning out of ephemeral and trashy works for a mindlessly uncritical female readership.

The novel and hierarchies of genre

Austen’s and Brunton’s comments bear witness to a kind of hierarchising of literary genres, with fiction ranked low: such an evaluation resulted partly from the assumption that writing novels required no special education or knowledge. The epic, as well as other poetic forms like the ode or the elegy, had a long history dating from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, while the sonnet varieties emerged from the Italian and English Renaissance. These established forms had conventions of motif, imagery and structure which required some education to master. So did the major theatrical genres of tragedy, historical drama and comedy, which had descended from Greece and Rome and / or from the achievements of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. And it was males who generally had the superior education – especially in the classical languages, which dominated the schooling of upper-middle and upper-class boys but were seldom taught to their sisters. The demarcation between the sexes was less salient in the case of historical works, in that girls were certainly exposed to them, but they could not pursue their studies at university level until the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Thus so much fiction was written by women, the premise went, because turning it out required little training. Nor did writing a novel demand original imaginative powers, since it was a mass-market commodity, and women writers were considered more adept at reproducing the conventional or reassembling others’ ideas, than at striking out creatively on their own.

Barbauld herself argued that fiction by women showcased not so much an inherent difference between the sexes as the distinctions between the kinds of lives they led. In the classes where the females were not obliged to work for a living, a woman’s existence might be quite uneventful, whereas men had more active, public-facing lives. In the introduction to her collection, Barbauld asked why women ‘are apt to give a melancholy tinge to their compositions’. She suggests that ‘men, mixing at large in society, have a brisker flow of ideas, and, seeing a greater variety of characters, introduce more of the business and pleasures of life into their productions’, whereas women ‘nurse [their] feelings in secrecy and silence’ (Barbauld 1810/2002, 405–406).

Yet notions of underlying distinctions between the sexes were very persistent. About 40 years after Barbauld’s comments, critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78), writing on ‘The Lady Novelists’, conceded that a man should accept that a woman possessed ‘an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his own’ (Lewes 1852, 129). But Lewes also claimed that in general terms, ‘the Masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect, and the Feminine by the predominance of the emotions’, and that in women writers, ‘their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions’ more than in their male counterparts (Lewes 1852, 131–2). Often taken to more extremes than in Lewes’s case, such assumptions militated against acknowledging women as capable of producing anything that possessed intellectual cogency.

Nonetheless the novel gained greater stature as the nineteenth century went on, and this was in part due to the achievements of female practitioners. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a runaway success in 1847, brought to the fore women’s potential both for sexual passion and for challenging injustice and oppression: the novel had many descendants. Meanwhile Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848 published Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, one of the most distinguished contributions to ‘condition of England’ fiction – a genre practised by novelists of both sexes which gave serious attention to social change and its costs. Then about a decade later came Adam Bede (1859), the first novel of Marian Evans, the woman who wrote as ‘George Eliot’(1819–80). She was a person of formidable intellect and erudition, as is especially evident in her last two novels, Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876).

On the other hand, sometimes women novelists, including Charlotte Brontë and Marian Evans, felt the need to publish under male, or male-sounding, pseudonyms in order to garner respect, Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) and her sisters Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49) published as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell respectively, while Marian Evans reinvented herself as George Eliot. All were aware that women’s writing was often judged differently from men’s. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) were outspoken and contentious in different ways, Wuthering Heights for its violence, passion, and apparently amoral outlook, and The Tenant for its demonstration of how legal inequality between the sexes and social attitudes to women could contribute to an abusive marriage. Hence readers were shocked when, after their premature deaths, Charlotte disclosed her sisters’ identities as women. Then in Marian Evans’s essay, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, which appeared anonymously in 1856, the future novelist pointed to the critical double standard by which inferior and therefore unthreatening fiction by women was welcomed by male commentators with patronising praise, while truly estimable works by writers like Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell had a lukewarm reception (Eliot 1856, 460).

Poetry

While ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ foreshadows the emergence of George Eliot the novelist, a notable poem published in the same year marks the culmination of the career of the mid-century’s most prominent woman poet. This was the deliberately epic Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61). Longer than the great English epic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1666), Barrett Browning’s poem also follows in the wake of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude which had been published as recently as 1850. Like Wordsworth’s poem, Aurora Leigh treats the speaker’s trajectory towards embracing the vocation of poet, but in this case, the speaker is female. It addresses directly the prejudices that hamper would-be women poets from forging careers in literature, many of them rooted in women’s habitual education in trivial accomplishments, as well as in submission to both social convention in general and men in particular. Aurora, when proposed to by her cousin Romney, refuses to accept the role of mere helpmeet to a man. Aurora and Romney do eventually reconcile, but only after each has undergone difficult experience, experience that forces them to confront social ills and their intractability, and obliges Romney to accept the contribution to society that a woman poet might make.

The poem’s focus on social ills, however, also aligns it with contemporary fiction: although written throughout in blank verse, Aurora Leigh engages with debates of the kind increasingly found in fiction of the mid-Victorian period. Barrett Browning termed the work a ‘novel-poem’, by which she meant both something innovative (novel) and a literary hybrid. Aurora Leigh was much praised, and much read.

Barrett Browning’s achievement in Aurora Leigh represented a woman poet at the height of her powers, highly educated and steeped in classical tradition (her scholarship in Greek was particularly impressive), successfully adopting a revered genre, the epic. But she did so in order to contend with pressing contemporary concerns, and in ways that were in the 1850s more typical of fiction than of poetry. Nonetheless, the general history of women’s poetry over the nineteenth century was quite fraught, and paradoxical in its implications as well.

Stephen C. Behrendt, writing of the period between 1770 and 1830, points out that poetry at this time was more central to British cultural life and public discourse than at any time since: more than 10,000 volumes were published over these sixty years (Behrendt 2009, 13). This was an especially turbulent era politically, with the American War of Independence (1778–82), the French Revolution (1789–), the debate over slavery and the slave trade as practised by Britain, and strong movements for political reform in the nation itself: for expanding the franchise from its very limited base and extending access to public office for those outside the Church of England. Britain was also at war with France from 1793 to 1815. Women were prominent in writing poetry of all kinds and on a wide variety of topics.

The critical reception of women’s poetry, as of their novels, could involve patronising them and damning them with faint praise, or highlighting especially ‘feminine’ qualities such as devotion to domestic and family life, submissiveness, tenderness, and chastity. Women poets could nonetheless turn these expectations to account, as when they protested about how slavery rent families asunder; about how the deaths and injuries suffered by husbands and fathers in wartime affected the emotional and indeed financial wellbeing of their wives and offspring; about how children were exploited in mines and factories (Behrendt 2009, 58ff; Swaminathan 2023, 60–1). They might also produce works that ostensibly focused on the domestic or specific, but evoked the larger contexts often considered beyond the scope of women’s understanding. For example, Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’ (1807), a long blank-verse poem, is centred on a coastal location looking out on the English Channel, and it links the details of the natural world to the history of the area and the political state of the war with France (Crisafulli 2007, 49–52).

But too overt a political focus in women’s poetry could be risky. In 1812, Anna Letitia Barbauld, a significant poet as well as a critic, published in ‘Eighteen-Hundred and Eleven’ a forcible critique of the degeneration and corruption that she believed accounted for Britain’s then-dire predicament in the war against France. Her effort was belittled as both unpatriotic and an intrusion on subjects that she as a woman was incapable of understanding. Barbauld lived for another 13 years, but never published again under her own name. Meanwhile the women poets who became most prominent in the 1820s, Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1794–1835) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (‘L. E. L.’, 1802–38) owed much of their popularity to what were ostensibly ‘feminine’ traits in their work, notably a focus on women’s emotional lives. Recent criticism has complicated the picture in both cases.

Emotional outpourings were expected of women poets, while adeptness in traditional poetic forms was not. In this context, the revival of the sonnet form in the late eighteenth century was significant. Charlotte Smith was the pioneer here, publishing in 1784 a collection of 16 poems called Elegiac Sonnets which was very popular, as well as influential for other writers. Smith’s final collection (she died in 1806) took the number of sonnets to 92. The form was especially welcomed by women. Apparently less ambitious than a long blank-verse poem, a sonnet could showcase great poetic skill, on account of its limited number of lines (14) and the constraints of its rhythm and rhyme schemes. Considerable expressiveness could result from emotion being compressed into a narrow formal compass, but a reader would not lose sight of the writer’s virtuosity, the performative dimension of her enterprise. A sonnet was not, then, an unstudied outpouring of feminine feeling (Behrendt 2009, 117ff). The sonnet form continued to be popular with women poets throughout the nineteenth century, notable collections being Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Monna Innominata (1881) by Christina Rossetti (1830–94): both offered a female take on the traditional male-authored love sonnets of the Renaissance, updated to their own era.

By the 1830s, however, the cultural dominance of poetry had ended. Charlotte Smith herself, long in difficult financial straits because of her husband’s debts, took to concentrating on fiction by the 1790s because it was more lucrative than poetry. Yet paradoxically, this change did provide opportunities for women poets. With poetry being less of a mass-market phenomenon than fiction, it was a safer genre to deploy when handling controversial topics. Poetry was less likely to contend with contemporary life than was fiction, but when it did, it might be more daring. Aurora Leigh, after all, would feature a major character who experienced rape – a subject unlikely to be treated in novels because the major circulating libraries, the principal buyers of fiction, were conservative about what they found acceptable.

Just as the sonnet remained popular, the dramatic monologue was also taken up by women poets from the 1850s onwards. This form provided scope for a virtuoso presentation of a striking individual through verse, with the speaker vocalising this figure’s words. It could also be used as a vehicle for social critique, with the protagonist exemplifying a condition created by social pressures and predicaments as much as an individual personality. The outstanding practitioner here was Augusta Webster (1837–94).

Women poets were especially given to expressing the lives of ‘fallen women’: women disgraced by engaging in sex without marriage. The characters portrayed were various, but the poems generally featured a critique of the circumstances that brought on this ‘fallen’ condition, and of the prejudices (and double standards) which made outcasts of these women (Morgan 2019, 16ff). Again, this was a topic difficult to treat in fiction, especially if the woman was to be the central character. Other contentious questions aroused by women’s experiences and their social context also came to be regularly canvassed in women’s poetry, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century: these included women’s doubts about marriage before embarking on it, dissatisfaction with married life as it turned out to be, the predicament of women who committed adultery, and the dilemma of being sexually attracted to other women rather than to men (Harrington 2019, 197ff; Ehnenn 2019, 220–4).

Drama and theatre

By comparison with fiction and poetry, the activity of women as playwrights over the nineteenth century has been the subject of far less scholarship. This situation results partly from general critical neglect of nineteenth-century drama and theatre as such. Katherine Newey’s (2005) Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain has been a landmark study, and I draw here largely on her work.

Writing mostly prior to the Victorian period, Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) was a prominent playwright. Published from the early nineteenth century, her series that came to be called Plays on the Passions was much admired. Each drama was a study of the effects of an overarching passion (love, hatred, ambition) on the protagonist. Baillie initially published the plays anonymously, and on the revelation of her identity, she encountered, as a learned respectable woman, little misogyny. The plays had mixed success in performance, however, and, like much of women’s literary output (the poetry of Hemans and Landon being cases in point), their reputation had faded by the later decades of the century.

Not that lack of stage success necessarily damaged an author’s reputation. There was, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, considerable prejudice against theatres as places where most performed material was supposedly of low quality and the audience mainly not drawn from the respectable classes. Hence writing plays for reading rather than performance was not uncommon. The dubious reputation of the theatre did however have particular implications for women who sought staging of their plays. As a physical and social space, a place where a woman might have to engage directly with male managers and actors, a theatre was difficult for a respectable woman to navigate. Prevalent assumptions, too, about the kinds of experiences familiar to respectable women also counted against women having work accepted for performance. For example, Isabel Hill’s The First of May (1829) dealt with the reign of Edward IV, but this king’s promiscuous sex life was not the kind of topic with which a respectable single woman was expected to be au fait.

In practice, there were numerous women playwrights, even if their output made up only about 12% of the plays written over the nineteenth century. Some of them avoided the strictures about women’s involvement in theatre through being part of theatrical families: such dynasties were plentiful, with representatives prominent across two or more generations, and the female members might write as well as perform. Moreover, the emphasis of scholars on the London theatres with royal patents (Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the Haymarket) has led to their overlooking the extensive activity in other theatres, and in genres other than the male-dominated genres of tragedy and historical dramas that were the mainstay of the patent theatres.

Women produced melodramas, comedies, and farces, and these were performed across the theatrical spectrum. The two latter genres, too, sometimes incorporated satire of the condition and ideology of domesticity. Then in later decades (the 1870s onward), women writers recognised the potential of Henrik Ibsen’s dramas to further the proto-feminist cause. They included Frances Lord, who translated The Doll’s House into English, and Eleanor Marx, who staged a reading of this translation in 1885. Women were more central than has been properly acknowledged in translating and promoting Ibsen’s work. In the late nineteenth century and into the early part of the twentieth, women playwrights were prominent in bringing to the stage revelations of women’s lived experience, just as female novelists and poets did in their own genres. Finally, it is important to recognise as well that many kinds of drama were written for private rather than public staging, and that women were prolific in penning these: they included charades, plays for children, fairy plays, collections of poems and other literary extracts.

Other genres

I have noted women writers’ output of plays for a child audience; poetry and fiction directed at children were also genres in which women were very active. Like fiction in general, moreover, writing for children found an ever-burgeoning readership over the century, as literacy, educational endeavour and the cheapness of books escalated. Becoming increasingly prominent too were periodicals and magazines for children and adolescents.

As outlined above, the assumption that women were governed by emotions had enabling as well as restrictive implications for their poetry – and so too did the expectation that women’s lives would centre round bringing up children create for them literary opportunities. Women’s engagement in writing for a child readership was uncontentious, and many of the leading figures in the field were female.

Women’s accepted role as educators of children also meant that their capacity for offering moral guidance – another trait associated with femininity – came to the fore in their writing for this readership. For moral guidance was central to what was considered the purpose of children’s literature. Although this trait makes much of it unpalatable to modern readers, some fiction of this ilk has survived, including Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which addresses the mistreatment of animals (Nelson 2015, 251–3)

Books suited to young children had developed over the late eighteenth century, in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane and Ann Taylor, Priscilla Bell Wakefield, and (the ubiquitous) Anna Letitia Barbauld. Notable features were the proliferation of poetry for children, and a frequent focus on introducing them to the natural world. Also significant was the common presence in the texts of a female educator, a mature, intelligent, benevolent and confident figure who thus modelled her sex’s capacity for knowledge and wisdom. Wakefield (1751–1832), the most successful of these writers, was particularly concerned with preparing girls for their futures, futures which might include paid work (Ruwe 2023, 11–20). Much later, in the 1880s, L. T. Meade would establish Atalanta, a magazine for female adolescents which included career advice. Implicitly for both writers, marriage should not be the sole focus of a girl’s aspirations.

Unlike children’s literature, the genre we now call life-writing was problematic for women of the nineteenth century. Producing an account of one’s own life risked coming across as egotistical, in an environment where women’s lives were thought to be fundamentally relational: given meaning through their familial and emotional bonds with others rather than their existence as individuals (Peterson 1999, 25). Hence when Mary Somerville (1780–1872), a distinguished astronomer, died before the publication of her reminiscences, Personal Recollections from Early Life to Old Age, her publisher John Murray edited the text to put less emphasis on Somerville’s actual professional achievements (Hanbery-Mackay 2015, 173–4). Indeed, in paying tribute to a fellow writer in her landmark Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell had highlighted the sufferings and privations undergone by Charlotte and her sisters, in order to mute their public reputation as strong-willed and transgressive, the image created by their fiction. Meanwhile Anne Thackeray Ritchie produced extensive material of an autobiographical kind, but rather than undertake a work unequivocally centred on herself, she scattered this material among her studies and recollections of other writers, as well as in her editions of the works of her famous father, the novelist W. M. Thackeray (Hanbery-Mackay 2015, 170).

The tradition of spiritual autobiography, which accepted the premise that human beings’ spiritual experience was independent of sex, could offer the opportunity for more open self-expression for women. But there were still constraints. The devout Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790–1846), mostly known as a novelist, plays down in her Personal Recollections (1841) her unhappy first marriage, and indeed her fiction itself (Peterson 1999, 43–50; Hanbery-Mackay 2015, 160–1). Similarly feminist activist Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), in her Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself (1894), fails to reveal her lesbian relationship with her companion Mary Lloyd (Hanbery-Mackay 2015, 171–72).

By contrast, a ground-breaking writer like Harriet Martineau (1802–76), while drawing on the genre of spiritual autobiography, also de-stresses the domestic aspect of a woman’s life, in favour of presenting self-development as having mental, social, political and economic dimensions (Peterson 1999, 54ff). Martineau had actually defied convention in the early 1830s, bringing out a series of pamphlets entitled Illustrations of Political Economy and thus intruding on an area of expertise considered to be masculine. Like Barbauld before her, Martineau was a polymath, producing fiction, philosophy, works on politics and economics, travel-writing, and history.

Martineau’s A History of England in the Thirty Years Peace (1849), covering the period after the end of the war with France in 1815, was another venture into an arena dominated by men. In writing history, women might well encounter limiting assumptions about their sex. They were often considered unprofessional, shallow and moralistic, whereas history-writing was thought to demand academic research into primary resources, as well as an objective approach, especially as the discipline became centred in the universities to which women long had no access (Logan 2015, 206–209). This prejudice did not however deter numerous women from becoming historians. Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), for example, produced two scholarly works about early British queens and medieval women in 1838 and 1843 respectively, and sisters Elizabeth and Agnes Strickland drew on unpublished records, public and private, to write a long series of works about women from the British royal family. Especially notable is the achievement of Mary Ann Green (1818–95), who was employed at the Public Record Office for 40 years and compiled from there the first calendars of State papers (Logan 2015, 215).

The press

An important development over the nineteenth century was the growth of the newspaper and periodical press. As with fiction, increasing literacy rates and technological advances fostered the expansion of these outlets, while various charges on newspapers were gradually repealed between 1833 and 1861. This growth provided opportunities for writers of both sexes. Part of the development, too, included periodicals and magazines directed at particular audiences. As in the case of outlets geared for a child audience, women were especially prominent in producing copy for periodicals and magazines aimed at their sex. Such publications might focus on women’s traditional domestic roles, but others adopted a more proto-feminist approach to female life, advocating policies to do with education, employment opportunities and property rights for women – notably the Englishwoman’s Review (1866–1910). There were also journals open to, and / or edited by, working-class women (Easley 2015, 19–21). Much of the long nineteenth century’s poetic output, too, was to be found in periodicals and newspapers rather than books (Hughes 2015, 89).

One notable aspect of women’s access to the press was their potential to publish anonymously and thus avoid sexist judgements of their work. Newspaper copy was largely anonymous, while periodicals and magazines up to the 1860s almost never provided authors’ names, and some continued this practice for decades longer. Women’s writing for newspapers is still an under-studied area, but it is known that Harriet Martineau wrote many anonymous leaders and reviews between 1852 and 1866 in the London Daily News. The advantage here was that Martineau could write on political subjects in particular in a period when political writing was assumed to be the domain of men. As far as periodicals are concerned, women took advantage of anonymity to cover a variety of genres that were coded masculine. Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857), who effectively edited the left-wing Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1832 to 1846, also wrote prolifically for the title on almost any imaginable topic, and her brief included politics, religion, social questions, science and geography (Wilkes 2015, 237ff). Marian Evans in her career as a journalist, writing mostly for the radical Westminster Review, dealt primarily with philosophy, religion, and sociology. Nor were only left-wing or radical outlets open to women who wished to grapple with subjects often considered beyond their capacity: the Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine welcomed Anne Mozley’s writing on religious issues, Elizabeth Julia Hasell’s contributions on classical literature, and Margaret Oliphant’s coverage of a plethora of subjects.

Finally, it is worth emphasising that women often did not confine themselves to one genre. Being adaptable was especially important if a woman had to write for money – and the likelihood of this was greater than in the case of men, because of women’s lack of access to business, the civil service, and the professions, the careers which often underpinned male literary endeavours. But working in a variety of genres was not confined to those with pressing financial needs. Women writers in the long nineteenth century were adventurous and versatile.

References

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