Women’s Writing, Volume 12, Number 1, 2005

INTRODUCTION

Women Writing History

MARK LLEWELLYN & ANN HEILMANN

“I am fond of history.”
“I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that
does not vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and
pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any
women at all.” (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey [1818])[1]

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
(Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” [1891])[2]

There can be few feminist readers who have not shared Catherine Moorland’s
frustration with the general absence of women from history and historical
narrative; there must be fewer still who have passively accepted Wilde’s
deliberately provocative statement. Indeed, one of the driving forces in literary
criticism in recent decades has been the desire to re-examine and resurrect
women’s histories and women’s literary voices from their enforced silence in the
historical narratives written by great men. Groundbreaking anthologies,
editions, and edited collections of Renaissance, Restoration, Romantic, and
Victorian women writers have been appearing since the 1970s.[3] This journal
itself was established in 1994 with the express aim of focusing critical attention
“on lesser-known writers and on early periods of women’s literary history”.[4]
However, while historical women writers have now become part of the literary
and critical marketplace, what has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves
is the relationship these writers had with history itself; the fact that they are
women writing history. The articles in this special issue seek to address this gap
by looking afresh at the role of time and history, narrative and gender in the
writings of a selection of women ranging in period from the medieval to the
late Victorian and in genres as diverse as the Renaissance pastoral, the Victorian
historical novel, and choral scores of early nineteenth-century Romanticism.
The opening article, by Tara Foster, explores the construction of ideals of
femininity in a medieval saint’s life. Focusing her attention on three writings of

3
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann
the life of Saint Catherine, two male-authored versions and a third by the nun
Clemence of Barking, Foster draws attention to the multiple and gendered
nature of exemplarity constructed in these texts. Unlike the male authors Gui
and Aumeric, Clemence “composes a rendition of the Life of Saint Catherine of
Alexandria in which she creates a link between herself, a cloistered virgin who
deftly manipulates words, and Catherine, the consecrated virgin with immense
rhetorical prowess” (p. 14). Thus, the creation of historical narrative is seen in
the light of its present utility and this usefulness is constructed by relating
(literally “telling”) the story of an educated, eloquent, and exemplary female
speaker. Foster emphasises that the relationship between the female historical
subject and the female author, and indeed implied female readers, is one of
shared exemplarity, for “[W]hile Catherine’s beheading ultimately silences her,
another woman, Clemence, continues the legacy of female speech created by the
saint” (p. 15). Indeed, part of Clemence’s (un)intended influence might even be
to encourage other women to follow the example not necessarily of the saint’s
life, but of her own; “to emulate Clemence herself by pursuing a literary
project ... [P]resenting her female readers with the model of a woman who
speaks well and the model of a woman who writes well, Clemence invites other
women to follow this verbal example as well as the spiritual one” (p. 17). Yet, as
Foster is acutely aware and eager to point out, it would be a mistake to view
Clemence’s project as intentionally radical. In her portrait of Catherine, as in the
versions by the male authors, the saint has “extraordinary powers of speech”
(p. 21) but “she is the exception that confirms the rule that women should not
speak because they cannot speak well, for she does not speak like a woman at
all” (p. 21). However, Foster’s article argues convincingly for a reading of
Clemence’s work as an act which creates not only “a literary ancestor, but the
possibility of a literary heritage in which other women may also take part”
(p. 24).
The creation of heritage or, more precisely, of inheritance is the focus of
Anna Beer’s article on Elizabeth Ralegh. Beer’s current and previous work on
Ralegh has already investigated the relationship between Elizabeth and her
husband, Sir Walter. In her article here, Beer argues that the nature of Ralegh’s
engagement with history and historical narrative marks her out as a historian in
her own right: “[s]he engages with a variety of textual practices in order to
create revised narratives of the past, which are then related to the present in
order to effect change” (p. 29). As Beer acknowledges, “Ralegh as a historian ...
demands a widening of the notion of authorship” (p. 30), and this is in part
where the value of Beer’s article lies. Through a close reading and detailed
examination of the events after Walter Ralegh’s death in 1618, specifically
Elizabeth Ralegh’s numerous court cases throughout the 1620s as she set out to
assert her son’s claim to his father’s possessions, titles, and lands (all removed
when Ralegh was convicted of treason), Beer draws attention to Elizabeth’s
ability to construct, invoke, and rewrite history. From her use of documents,

4
 INTRODUCTION

letters, and all the means of textual transmission and evidence gathering at her
disposal, it is possible to perceive how Ralegh herself remade the “history of her
world” and her husband’s own past and death. As Beer states, “she created a
new narrative of Sir Walter’s life and death, transforming him from traitor to
hero, and then communicating that narrative to others” (p. 33); perhaps most
interesting, as Beer highlights, is the fact that it is her history which “although
hidden behind the male-dominated legal, political, and textual institutions of
her time, contributed to the formation of a collective and social memory of her
husband that was politically effective in her own time, and still persists today”
(p. 38).
Moving from the revision of political history in the seventeenth century to
a woman writer’s challenge of literary tradition, the next article, Heidi Laudien’s
contribution, re-examines the seventeenth-century poet Aphra Behn’s work in
the context of the almost exclusively male tradition of the pastoral. As Laudien
argues, “[i]n Behn’s hands, this inherently imitative genre assumes interesting
dimensions as a host of subversive women’s stories emerge, featuring powerful
heroines equipped not only with sexual and political, but also authorial power”
(p. 43). Laudien suggests that it is through the realisation of female control over
the genre that women writers can begin to assert a greater sense of female
empowerment in the actions and activities of women in the verse itself; that
control over authorship leads to a liberation not only of the writer, but also of
the gender and sexual paradigms figured in the textual world which she now
controls. Yet Laudien also highlights that Behn, like Clemence of Barking and
several of the other women writers whose work is discussed in this issue, is all
too keenly aware of the masculine nature of both literary and historical
discourse; indeed, it is in this respect that she, like Clemence, is most cunning.
In adopting a male tradition and seemingly echoing its most traditional
elements, such as the clearly identifiable “Theocritean sense of beauty” (p. 44) or
allusions to Virgil and others in her poems, Behn is able to circumvent and pre-
empt criticisms of her as a woman using the genre. This act of literary
subversion allows Behn the freedom to initiate variations between her work and
that of her “classical predecessor[s]” (p. 44) and simultaneously engage with a
much more liberal representation of pastoral existence. Thus, while Behn
explores stock themes of the pastoral such as sexuality and love, in her poems it
is not “a hierarchical love based upon difference, but a progressive love that
acknowledges the possibility of mutual passion, equal love, and perfect respect”
(p. 45). It is in her understanding of the natural world that, in Laudien’s view,
Behn proves to be most innovative, particularly in her advocacy of a “natural
world [which] responds to both male and female desires, and [where] nature
provides both the place and the opportunity to improve upon the practices of
love” (p. 46). Yet despite Behn’s appropriation of a masculine tradition and her
redesignation of some of its features for new purposes of female liberation, in
writing within a genre that was always seen as an apprentice one, a type of

5
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann
poetry from which male poets graduated to more mature forms, and in her
portrayal of women whom Laudien sees falling into the categories of
“promiscuous vixen, selfish nymph, ‘lesbian’ lover, dominatrix” (p. 51), the
status of Behn’s female characters as “independent” from men, the male gaze,
and the sexual stereotype of the femme fatale might be called into question.
The fourth article in this special issue takes us from the woman writer to
the woman composer. As Edith Zack argues, it is not only in literary texts but
also in musical scores that the threads of history, intertextuality, and gender can
be traced. Musical texts, according to Zack, must be read in the light of
knowledge about “the composer’s social position, history, and psychology, and
we must listen for the many contexts – musical, social, anthropological, and
historical” (p. 60) – in order to understand fully the intentions of the composer’s
work. Zack takes the example of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn, older sister of the
more famous Felix, “whose male gender has assured him of a place in the canon
of great masters” (p. 61). In 1831 Fanny wrote the cantata “Lobgesang”, which
engaged with the traditional themes of the pastoral cantata on the one hand and
her more personal concerns about birth, motherhood, and her own Judaeo-
Christian origins on the other. As Zack notes, the cantata as a genre was
considered masculine and “[w]omen composers tended to write character pieces
(fantasies, lieder, songs without words, potpourris, impromptus, bagatelles,
études, nocturnes, scherzos, variations, ballads, mazurkas, boleros, polonaises).
These small forms could be played on the piano, which was an integral part of
the bourgeois home and thus always at hand” (p. 62); presumably, like the
piano, the bourgeois wife was similarly always at hand. Fanny, however, was
supported in her work by her painter-husband Wilhelm, and Zack outlines how
it was the very harmonious nature of her domestic life that led to Fanny’s
composition of a cantata which celebrates motherhood in a Christian context (it
was written as a piece for celebrations of Christ’s nativity) but personalises the
religio-historical story. Whereas in most “baroque cantatas” listeners hear “the
voice of the Christian Church, mingled with the voices of scripture and
traditional chorale” (p. 63), in the case of “Lobgesang” Fanny Hensel-
Mendelssohn “disconnected the metaphor of the woman in labour from the
biblical chapter’s context and turned it into a narrative in its own right” (p. 63).
Thus, although the cantata is somewhat dislocated from tradition, it also
becomes an exceptionally creative and original “Christmas piece which really
celebrates not the Lord’s nativity, but the birth of her own precious son” (p. 63).
Female engagement with religious discourse is also a central theme in
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein’s article on Victorian women writers and the
Protestant historical novel. Burstein’s work provides new insights into an
underexplored and unfairly neglected genre of the nineteenth century – “the
Reformation novel”. Recognising the inherent conservatism of a literary form
that depends on a period of religious hatred and anti-Catholic sentiment,
Burstein nevertheless argues persuasively for a reading of these texts which

6
 INTRODUCTION

acknowledges the liberatory potential for their female authors. Protestant

women writers, disenfranchised as they were “from professional theological
circles”, turned their energies towards furthering “the anti-Catholic goals of
Protestant organisations like the Reformation Society by popularising religious
controversy for lay audiences of all ages” (p. 74). A complex picture thus
emerges of an oppressed group (women) finding the potential for a form of
enfranchisement by authoring, distributing, and reading propagandist literature
expressly designed to maintain oppression over another group (Catholics). As
Burstein suggests, women’s surprising presence amongst the oppressors of
Catholicism can be explained by the very nature of the “anti-Catholic
propaganda” which emphasised “Catholicism’s purported threat to womanhood
(via celibacy) and the home (ditto)” (p. 74). Lone reading, self-knowledge, and
the inner spiritual voice are, of course, the cornerstones of Protestantism’s sola
fide belief, and Burstein stresses that these were the markers of Reformation
novels too, in which moments underlining the “intimacy of the reading
experience” carried particular appeal for both women writers and their female
characters, “demonstrat[ing] that Protestantism offer[ed] women access to an
authentic spiritual equality” (p. 80). Although Burstein concludes that
Reformation tales presented readers with a “gender- and class-neutral model of
heroism that elevated spiritual above physical strength, thereby altering the
landscape ... of historical participation” (p. 82), they also “reasserted the
quintessentially Protestant fabric of English liberty in an age that saw growing
tolerance for Roman Catholic claims to equal citizenship” (p. 82). In terms of
their overarching historical narrative, Reformation tales described not a linear
progression, but “an eternal loop of persecution and salvation” (p. 82) which, for
Protestants, meant that the failure to heed warnings now would lead to future
persecutions, martyrdoms, and, for women, the possible loss of those few
liberties and rights they currently held: history, these texts declared, could not
be allowed to repeat itself.
Where Burstein traces the elements of religion and historical engagement
for women writers through the “Reformation novel” as a genre, Deborah
Wynne examines the use of similar themes in a specific text. Elizabeth Gaskell’s
novella Lois the Witch, Wynne argues, is a text at the intersection of both textual
and literal historical narratives. First published in serial format in Dickens’s All
the Year Round, and presented in close proximity to the concluding instalments of
Dickens’s own historical fiction A Tale of Two Cities, Gaskell’s novella also deals
with revolutions, terrors, and psychological trauma. As Wynne points out, Lois
the Witch differs from other examples of Gaskell’s historical fiction because it
deals with a real historical event, the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. Wynne
argues that the choice of Salem, with its conflation in the public imagination of
issues of witchcraft, religious belief, and gender, was a deliberate means of
historical displacement which enabled Gaskell to discuss freely matters of closer
historical and geographical relevance – specifically, the Irish revivals of 1859

7
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann
and the public understanding of female hysteria. Drawing upon the work of
critics like Elaine Showalter, Wynne suggests that Gaskell’s interest lies in
conceptualising hysteria “less as a condition of women’s biology (a prevalent
view among many contemporary medical theorists) and more as a desperate
response to repressive political and domestic regimes” (p. 86); hence the
parallels between Salem and Ireland, not to mention the wider ramifications of
women’s domestic and political subservience in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
We must, however, remain aware that Gaskell, like Dickens, was a novelist, not
a historian, and her “focus [was] not on specific ‘facts’, but an imaginative
recreation of the conditions which engendered this hysterical outburst and its
distorting effects upon the female community” (p. 86). While the imperatives of
the storyteller and the history-maker may be different, Wynne suggests
convincingly that, when read in its original serialised context, Lois the Witch is a
powerful example of the novelist’s ability to engage with historical narrative
and simultaneously make important comments on contemporary political and
social factors.
Religion and spirituality – be it in the form of a medieval saint’s life, the
Protestant historical novel, or the use of Salem as a comment on 1850s Ulster –
appear to be prevalent modes of discourse within women’s historical agency and
their (re)engagement with historical narrative. In Monika Elbert’s article on
Harriett Beecher Stowe’s indebtedness to Sir Walter Scott, it is again, though
not solely, women’s spiritual qualities that come to the fore. Elbert is concerned
with Stowe’s revisionist female-centred history in The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862)
in its relation to Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and her close reading of
Stowe’s own reading of Scott’s novel reveals the intriguing connections between
the female novelist’s engagement with a male forebear and both writers’
understanding of the nature of historical agency. Perhaps most interesting is
Elbert’s elucidation of the similarities between Stowe’s construction of locality
in her American New England and Scott’s own mythologisation of Scotland. As
Elbert argues, this process locates itself firmly within the realm of a mystical
and, most certainly in Stowe, feminised discourse: Scott and Stowe “reflect upon
a vision of feminine history which is personal and attached to natural cycles,
and which eclipses a more chronological vision of masculine history that thrives
on conquest. Women are endowed with a fecund spiritual imagination; men,
bereft of their wits, need women to access this realm; women create a history
that men do not understand” (p. 109). Importantly, this vision is built upon
regionalism and localism imbued with “mysticism, thus raising it to the level of
a personal history which becomes a national psychology” (p. 101). History itself
is founded partly upon “the element of prophecy – and its relation to the
unravelling of history – ... in the context of the female characters” (p. 104).
Elbert’s use of both Emersonian and Kristevan theories of history and women’s
and men’s places within it, coupled with her focus on Stowe’s Mara, a character
who “is able to merge personal history, fiction, and nature” (p. 107),

8
 INTRODUCTION

demonstrates the feminine, natural, and essentially spiritual influence upon the
construction and understanding of historical action in Stowe’s text.
As Burstein, Wynne, and Elbert’s articles testify, the Victorian period was
a fertile age for the use of religious and spiritualised discourses by women
historical writers. Noelle Bowles’s article deals with a movement that attained
the status of a quasi-religion during the latter half of the nineteenth century –
Victorian medievalism. Bowles’s work concerns two of Christina Rossetti’s
poems and her engagement with the idea(l)s of the medievalist movement.
Drawing attention to “Rossetti’s revisionist insight” (p. 118), Bowles highlights
the ways in which “‘The Prince’s Progress’ and ‘A Royal Princess’, more than
any of her other works, revise and subvert the cultural framework of Victorian
neo-feudalism and its authoritarian, patriarchal philosophy” (p. 116). Bowles
argues that the poems “challenge medieval paradigms that idealise hierarchical
social systems” (p. 116) and, more specifically, that Rossetti offers a potent
deconstruction of the chivalric ideal which placed women “on a pedestal [from
which] they may be simultaneously raised and deserted” (p. 117). Bowles’s
analysis of the functional position of women in these poems, and in particular of
Rossetti’s highly ironic engagement with male authors such as Tennyson,
reveals how Rossetti sought to educate women readers into the realisation that
“within the medieval paradigm, the woman cannot win” (p. 120). Thus, the
outcome of female action in both “The Prince’s Progress” and Tennyson’s “The
Lady of Shalott”, irrespective of the contrasting nature of the actions of the
women themselves, leads to “the same unenviable fate” (p. 119); indeed the
choice of alternative routes becomes redundant since, if a woman “waits in
domestic tranquillity, taking no action on her own behalf, she may languish and
die upon a man’s inconstant whim, but if she violates the circumscribed
domestic sphere with her own agency, she faces a similar, though perhaps more
public, demise” (p. 120). Bowles sees Rossetti’s ultimate purpose in engaging
with male-authored resurrections of long-dead and often fictionalised historical
beliefs in the desire to “tear the veil of nostalgia from the nineteenth-century
fascination with medievalism and insist that readers confront the darker aspects
of this cultural fantasy” (p. 123); in a sense, Rossetti wishes to save her female
readers in particular from a fabricated, unrealistic, and, for women, undeniably
retrogressive state. As Bowles concludes, “[i]f readers are enchanted by the
glamour of medievalism and blindly accept its socio-political tenets, Christina
Rossetti suggests they will be happy never after” (p. 124).
Unhappiness as a consequence of buying into Victorian patriarchal ideals
is a recurrent theme in the work of the New Woman novelist Mona Caird, and
in the concluding article of this issue Lisa Surridge presents an analysis of
Caird’s critique of historical time in The Daughters of Danaus (1894). Closely
examining moments in the novel where Caird engages in “temporal shifts”
(p. 130), a plot gap, deliberate dislocations of narrative time, and the use of
subjective, protomodernist techniques, Surridge argues that Caird’s disruptions

9
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann
of “conventional narrative time reflect [her] feminist thinking during the 1880s
and early 1890s as she attempted to denaturalise the late-Victorian marriage
and gender system” (p. 128). Surridge elaborates on this point by suggesting
that it is through temporal antitheses and the deliberate presentation of
anachronisms between the setting of events and the events themselves that
Caird sought to advocate a feminist approach to history in order to demonstrate
“that gender relations were neither fixed nor God-given. Her writings reveal the
culturally constructed nature of gender relations by showing the sheer variety of
historical and cultural ideas of the family” across temporal and cultural divides
(p. 129). Surridge holds that Caird’s principal concern in her temporal
experimentation in The Daughters of Danaus lies with women because the central
scenes “all involve women; all occur outdoors; all involve an individual, not a
group. All remove women, in other words, from their habitual temporal,
domestic, and social frames” (p. 131). This does not mean that Caird’s novel is
set adrift from time; indeed, as Surridge highlights, “[t]his is not magic realism;
this is not Orlando” (p. 131). Rather, Caird’s breaches of linearity act as
momentary reminders of the artificiality of women’s gender positions in the
Victorian world. In temporarily liberating both her characters and her narrative
from the constraints of patriarchal assumptions about the “natural” order, and
women’s place within it, Caird highlights the possibility of a future in which
“women’s time” might be realised.
Several of the articles in this issue were originally delivered as papers at
the international conference we organised at the University of Wales Swansea in
August 2003, “Hystorical Fictions: Women, History and Authorship”. The
conference’s success lay in the broad range of subject areas, approaches,
historical periods, and literary genres under discussion, and we would like to
thank all those who took part for making it such an intellectually and critically
exciting event. We trust that the speakers whose papers are presented as articles
here (Foster, Laudien, Zack, Burstein, Wynne, Bowles, and Surridge), together
with the other articles (by Beer and Elbert), offer readers of this special issue a
stimulating sample of the many diverse and exciting ways in which feminist
critics are themselves (re)engaging with the issues surrounding women writing
history.

Notes
[1] Jane Austen (1972) Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 123.
[2] Oscar Wilde (1963) “The Critic as Artist”, The Works of Oscar Wilde (London:
Spring Books), pp. 857-898 (p. 868).
[3] See the recovery work in the 1970s and 1980s by, for example, Mary R. Mahl
& Helene Koon, eds (1977) The Female Spectator: English Women Writers before
1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press); Ellen Moers (1978) Literary
Women (London: Women’s Press); Elaine Showalter (1978) A Literature of Their
Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago); Sandra

10
 INTRODUCTION

Gilbert & Susan Gubar (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press);
Fidelis Morgan, ed. (1982) The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration
(London: Virago); Dale Spender (1982) Women of Ideas & What Men Have Done
to Them (London: Pandora); Dale Spender, ed. (1983) Feminist Theorists: Three
Centuries of Women’s Intellectual Traditions (London: Women’s Press); Dale
Spender, ed. (1986) Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Writers before Jane Austen
(London: Pandora); Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff & Melinda
Sansone, eds (1988) Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women’s
Verse (New York: Noonday Press); Janet Todd (1989) The Sign of Angellica:
Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800 (London: Virago). This list is by no
means exhaustive.
[4] See “Editorial”, Women’s Writing, 1(1) (1994), p. 3.

MARK LLEWELLYN is a research student in the Department of English at

the University of Wales Swansea. He recently co-edited a special issue of
Women: A Cultural Review (2004) and is now working on two co-edited special
issues (Critical Survey and Feminist Review, both 2007), and a collection on
contemporary women writers using history. He has published articles on
Katherine Phillips and Sarah Waters in Philological Quarterly and the Journal of
Gender Studies. He is the Secretary and a founding member of the Centre for
Research into Gender in Culture and Society (GENCAS) based at the University
of Wales Swansea (see www.swan.ac.uk/english/gender).

ANN HEILMANN is Professor of English and the Director of GENCAS at the

University of Wales Swansea. The general editor of Routledge’s Major Works
“History of Feminism” series, and the author of New Woman Fiction: Women
Writing First-wave Feminism (Macmillan/Palgrave, 2000) and New Woman
Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird (Manchester University
Press, 2004), she has edited two collections of essays, Feminist Forerunners
(Pandora, 2003) and New Woman Hybridities (with Margaret Beetham,
Routledge, 2004), and four anthologies, most recently Anti-feminism in the
Victorian Novel (Thoemmes Continuum, 2003) and an anthology on Anti-
feminism in Edwardian Literature (with Lucy Delap, forthcoming).

Correspondence
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann, Department of English, Keir Hardie
Building, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP,
United Kingdom (gender@swansea.ac.uk; m.e.llewellyn@ntlworld.com;
a.b.heilmann@swansea.ac.uk).

11
Mark Llewellyn & Ann Heilmann

12