Early English Women Novelists and their Heroines

We depart wildly from the usual nerdy book fare for this nerdy discussion about how those early English women writers created such enduring heroines. I talk with Robin Henry about these women writers and the lessons that we can learn from their struggle to write, and the epic nature of their heroines. 

Reading List for listeners who want to know more!

Scholarly Works:

Carriger, Gail. The Heroine's Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Fans of Pop Culture. GAIL CARRIGER LLC, 2020.

Donovan, Josephine. “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory.” Signs, vol. 16, no. 3, 1991, pp. 441–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174584. Accessed 7 Jul. 2022.

Frost, Cy, et al. “Autocracy and the Matrix of Power: Issues of Propriety and Economics in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Harriet Martineau.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, 1991, pp. 253–71. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464017. Accessed 7 Jul. 2022.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The madwoman in the attic : the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Yale University Press, 1984.

Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge Mary, and Mary Poovey. The proper lady and the woman writer : ideology as style in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Siskin, Clifford, and Henry W and Albert Berg.The work of writing : literature and social change in Britain, 1700-1830. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Authors to look at if you want to know more about early women’s writing and read some:

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Shelley

Anne Radcliffe

Maria Edgeworth

Eliza Haywood

Charlotte Lennox

Mary Robinson

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire

Be sure and check you the Chawton House Library, since it has a special mission to collect and promote scholarship on early women writers.  https://chawtonhouse.org/the-library/using-the-library/

You can see more writing about books, reading, and writing craft at http://readerly.net.  If you would like to join the Read Like a Writer Book Club, email robin at readerlybooks@gmail.com