The question of women and women's writing

John Gregory, M.D. A Father's Legacy to His Daughters, 6th edition (Dublin: John Colles, 1774)

[13] One of the chief beauties in a female character is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration. -- I do not wish you to be insensible to applause. If you were, you must become, if not worse, at least less amiable women. But you may be dazzled by that admiration, which yet rejoices your hearts.

When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of beauty. That extreme sensibility which it indicates, may be a weakness and incumbrance in our sex, as I have too often felt; but in yours it is peculiarly engaging. Pedants, who think themselves philosophers, ask why a woman should blush when she is conscious of no crime. It is a sufficient answer, that Nature has made you to blush when you are guilty of no fault, and has forced us to love you because you do so. -- Blushing is so far from being necessarily an attendant on guilt, that it is the usual companion of innocence.

This modesty, which I think so essential in your sex, will naturally dispose you to be rather silent in company, especially in a large one. -- People of sense and discernment will never mistake [14] such silence for dulness. One may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it, and this never escapes an observing eye.

[15] Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. -- But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.

Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London: J. Johnson and J. Bell, 1798).

From the first dawnings of reason they [women] find a part in life already prescribed for them, which they nearly as early find out to be unequal to their powers and capacities. They find themselves enclosed in a kind of magic circle, out of which they cannot move, but to contempt or destruction. And however confined and mortifying to their feelings this prison of the soul may be, they can never hope for emancipation, but from superior power. In this circle, in this prison therefore, during the reign of youth and beauty they gambol and frisk away life as they best can; happily blind and thoughtless as to futurity. But what comes then? Untaught, alas! by education or habit to reflect in that manner, which by exercising the reason, cultivates the mind, and opens up every day new and latent powers; reflection is to them a source of vexation only. They indeed see clearly enough that they are injured; but as they cannot see a way for redress, they often in despair turn to vanities and follies of most pernicious tendency in the higher circles; in middling life they degenerate more commonly into insipidity; and in the lower classes, especially in great and populous cities, into vulgar debauchery. (110-112)

Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, With a view of the principles and conduct prevalent among women of rank and fortune. 2nd edition, corrected (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1799).

Among the talents for the application of which women of the higher class will be peculiarly accountable, there is one, the importance of which they can scarcely rate too highly. This talent is influence. We read of the greatest orator of antiquity, that the wisest plans which it had cost him years to frame, a woman could overturn in a single day; and when one considers the variety of mischiefs which an ill-directed influence has been known to produce, one is led to reflect with the most sanguine hope on the beneficial effects to be expected from the same powerful force when exerted in its true direction. (1-2)

At this period, when our country can only hope to stand by opposing a bold and noble unanimity to the most tremendous confederacies against religion, and order, and governments, which the world ever saw; what an accession would it bring to the public strength, could we prevail on beauty, and rank, and talents, and virtue, confederating their several powers, to come forward with a patriotism at once firm and feminine for the general good! I am not sounding an alarm to female warriors, or exciting female politicians: I hardly know which of the two is the most disgusting and unnatural character. Propriety is to a woman what the great Roman critic says action is to an orator; it is the first, the second, the third requisite. A woman may be knowing, active, witty, and amusing; but without propriety she cannot be amiable. Propriety is the centre in which all the lines of duty and of agreeableness meet. It is to character what proportion is to figure, and grace to attitude. (5-6)

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Oxford University Press (first published 1818).

[First meeting of Henry Tilney with Catherine Moreland at Bath]

    'And are you altogether pleased with Bath?'
    'Yes -- I like it very well.'
    'Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again.'
    Catherine turned away her head, not knowing whether she might venture to laugh.
    'I see what you think of me,' said he gravely - 'I shall make but a poor figure in your journal to-morrow.'
    'My journal!'
    'Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings-plain black shoes -- appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.'
    'Indeed I shall say no such thing.'
    'Shall I tell you what you ought to say?'
    'If you please.'
    'I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him -- seems a most extraordinary genius -- hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.'
    'But, perhaps, I keep no journal.'
    'Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal?' (15)

Coventry Patmore "The Angel in the House" (1854)

Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
And seems to think the sin was hers;

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret. Broadwood Press, 2003. (first published 1862)

"one of the most noxious books of modern times"
-- North British Review 43 (September 1865): 96

In her better fortunes, as in her old days of dependence, wherever she went she seemed to take sunshine and gladness with her. In spite of Miss Alicia's undisguised contempt for her step-mother's childishness and frivolity, Lucy was better loved and more admired than the baronet's daughter. That very childishness had a charm which few could resist. The innocence and candour o£ an infant beamed in Lady Audley's fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty the character of extreme youth and freshness. She owned to twenty years of age, but it was hard to believe her more than seventeen. Her fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy velvets and stiff rustling silks, till she looked like a child tricked out for a masquerade, was as girlish as if she had but just left the nursery. All her amusements were childish. She hated reading, or study of any kind, and loved society . . . (p. 90)

Virginia Woolf, from "Women and Fiction" (1929)

But it is still true that before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face. To begin with, there is the technical difficulty -- so simple, apparently; in reality, so baffling -- that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman's use. Yet in a novel, which covers so wide a stretch of ground, an ordinary and usual type of sentence has to be found to carry the reader on easily and naturally from one end of the book to the other. And this a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.

But that, after all, is only a means to an end, and the end is still to be reached only when a woman has the courage to surmount opposition and the determination to be true to herself. For a novel, after all, is a statement about a thousand different objects -- human, natural, divine; it is an attempt to relate them to each other. In every novel of merit these different elements are held in place by the force of the writer's vision. But they have another order also, which is the order imposed upon them by convention. And as men are the arbiters of that convention, as they have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent.

It is probable, however, that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values -- to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important. And for that, of course, she will be criticized; for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is remains of a woman's day. The food that has been cooked is eaten; the children that have been nursed have gone out into the world. Where does the accent fall? It is difficult to say. Her life has an anonymous character which is baffling and puzzling in the extreme. For the first time, this dark country is beginning to be explored in fiction; and at the same moment a woman has also to record the changes in women's minds and habits which the opening of the professions has introduced. She has to observe how their lives are ceasing to run underground; she has to discover what new colours and shadows are showing in them now that they are exposed to the outer world.

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Document created March 21st 2005