Scribbling Women?

"America is given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women" complained Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1854, a comment that adds considerable point to Charlotte Brontë's wry remark of four years earlier, "I wish critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman."

Male authors of the 19th century were not notably generous to notable women writers. Robert Southey, in a letter to Charlotte Bronte¨ of 1836, had written sweepingly, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." Thomas Carlyle claimed that he knew at once that "George Eliot" was a woman: "I found out in the first two pages that it was a woman's writing - she supposed that in making a door, you last of all put in the panels."

(Charles Dickens, on the other hand, was convinced that Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life must have been written by a man: "If those two volumes, or part of them, were not written by a woman, then should I begin to believe that I am a woman myself.") And separation of the personal from the professional sometimes caused particular difficulties: Mrs Gaskell, admiring the novel Adam Bede, was alarmed when she heard rumours of "George Eliot"'s real identity. "It is a noble grand book, whoever wrote it - but Miss Evans' life taken at the best construction, does so jar against the beautiful book that one cannot help hoping against hope."

The picture is of course not all negative. Henry James thought that "A marvellous mind throbs in every page of Middlemarch." He would have sympathized with the simple question of Emily Dickinson, "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?"

For more information about two key women writers, turn to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, published in the Oxford World's Classics Authors in Context series.

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