ENNC 3500 Nineteenth Century Topics: Victorian Women Writers

1100-1215 TR - DELL 2, 101
Instructor: Ann Mazur

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë.

This course will survey women’s writing of the Victorian era (1837-1900), including canonical favorites such as the Brontës, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, in addition to currently lesser known writers such as Augusta Webster and Florence Bell. Women writers were among those impacted by the incredible surge in literary production during the Victorian period.  More than ever before, women from all social classes were publishing their writing in a wide variety of genres—from novels to poetry, dramas to essays.  Throughout the semester, we will study women’s writing in relationship to important nineteenth-century debates about gender. Along the way, we will consider questions such as: Are women writers constrained by the conventions of the marriage plot? How does a particular text work with or against the image of a woman as “Angel in the House”?  Do certain genres provide more opportunity for women writers?  Expect to read a variety of women’s work from sonnets to the gothic to scandalous sensation fiction.