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Nineteenth-Century Women Writers

Bernard Shaw, the most famous playwright of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, believed that most nineteenth-century women wanted nothing more than to get married.  This course will attempt to prove him wrong.  We will examine female novelists, poets, and social critics of nineteenth-century England who were themselves evidence against Shaw’s dim view of women and who created literary heroines to advance the changing role of women in both the domestic and public spheres. Our texts will provide us with unconventional female protagonists and offer us a chance to examine what, exactly, is the conventional in nineteenth century culture and literature that these writers and heroines are being “un” about. We will explore the role of women in nineteenth-century England and in nineteenth-century British literature, and the ways in which this critical period for the emergence of the female novelist and the female hero continues to influence writers of today.

Possible writers to be covered include Anne Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, and Virginia Woolf.  We’ll end the semester with a bit of fun by revisiting Austen’s heroines as they are reincarnated in the twentieth century by Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary).