Subversive, Rebellious, Genre-Busting: 18th and 19th Century Women Writers Move to Center Stage – Carol MacKay

Sam Baker is going to introduce our speaker this afternoon just so
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that we are very glad that Colonel is going to be able to speak to us about woman’s writers. I want to say a few
other things first. We have a very distinguished visitor with us this afternoon.
I’ve been forced to just say a word to James. Very
rare. Mainly. He
started his career as being repressed
in the 60s and went on to run the African
writers series of which was the most profitable one
of books ever. And he also
started his own press, very publishers, which continue to
publish academic and literary books on Africa. Those
of you who’ve been here have a history here at least a decade. Do you remember
the time when the press on the African writers you said, thank
you, James. We’re very glad to have you with us. I want to
say again that we try to encourage members of the British study seminar to put copies
of recent reviews. This is the one way that we are able to read each other’s work.
There is a review that I just wrote about our speaker next week. His recent
book. And I think that he may not like it very much. We’ll see.
I also want to say that this is the penultimate addition
of the one hundred and fifty books that are to be recommended, recommended to all
undergraduates to read or at least be familiar with before they graduate.
And I’ll pass this around just so you’ll be able to get some idea of it. But for those of you who would
actually like a copy, just let Holly know and we will
get it to you. It will be. This is a project that’s been going on for some three years
now. And this is about ready to go to press. It will be about half the size
and the spa about bounder and binder. And we’ll be distributed to all
the students in liberal arts at the beginning of the semester
with along with a poster that has just the titles of all of them.
Hundred and fifty books. Sam, it’s a it’s a real privilege and honor to introduce
Carol Mackay, who doesn’t really need introduction to so many views
since she’s such a stalwart of actually in various studies seminar
and that the junior fellows lunches as well and English
department and of the general community here at u._t. Also, it’s
it’s intimidating to introduce an expert. I’m biography and autobiography
because, you know, when is thrown into reflections on the on the
genre. And a lot of what I know about the genre, I feel like I know from
talking with Carol about it over the years. She’s our expert in the English Department on life writing
and also, of course, really are essential
in centrally active Victorian UST. Those two topics go together. I think
it’s fair to say that one of the things you most enjoy about Victorian authors
is the very
detailed sensibility they have for thinking about all the factors that they
make for a life and for the lives of the characters they introduced to
us for their own tales of their own formations.
In that that nuance we associate with the Victorians
is something that Carol has made a career of studying,
maybe most
ambitiously today in her wonderful book, Creative Activity for Victorian Exemplars
of the Female Quest, which I Stanford published and
which I Really remember enjoying reading when I first arrived at your team is getting to know
everybody here in the scene here because I feel like Carol’s project there and all
of her work really resonates with the vast Timothy English department in British
studies has done over the years. Carol’s a fantastic teacher.
The section on teaching awards on her long CV is
very hardy with. The region sets any teaching award heading
it up and also the area of service.
Carol, is second to none English department. In a big project that’s still underway right now, which
combines, I think, really research, teaching and local services.
The British Women Writers Conference upcoming here in April at U.T.,
which we’re all very excited about and which we’ll be hearing more about in her talk. And in our
discussion afterwards. Well, thank you, Sam, for that introduction. You haven’t had to do
that for me before. I think I’ve had to do it for you maybe once or twice, but we’ll continue passing
it back and forth. I’m going to pass around a few items
that I think will give you something to glance at while I’m talking. But before I
do, I’d like to introduce Casey, Slone, Casey, wave at everyone
who is a post-doc here in the English department right now. And she is one of the co-organizers
of the conference. She will stay around afterwards to help answer questions. And I may be
asking her a few questions as we go along. So what I’m going to do is pass around
an overview of the conference, which just lists the general schedule and the keynote
addresses. I’ll start with Roger here and then something on the special events
that are going on in conjunction with the conference and Elizabeth Garver
back at the back. And Diana light wave to we’ll be
conducting a session at the HRC where there will be an exhibit
available on Friday between 11 and one o’clock in the deniece room.
And for that last half hour, they will be talking about the collection here and
how people could be making good use of it who are arriving for the first time. We’re also going to have
two events at the PCL. One is just the exhibit
that has been put together called New Frontiers Women Writers and the British Raj.
And then on the afternoon of Friday, on Thursday,
we will be having a research workshop in the Perry Logan Library
for especially the attendees who would like to be learning more about, again, our libraries
and research tactics. But it will also be available to others of you if you wish to stop by.
So that’s this one. And then the last thing is a list of the
previous papers I’ve given to British women writers conferences going back to nineteen ninety six.
And on the back, some of the panels that I’ve chaired. And I’m doing this to provide
an opportunity for you to see all the different kinds of topics that kind of range and depth
that I think has been going on for this conference over the last twenty five years.
Twenty six years ago in nineteen ninety two, a group of scholars whose
work was focused on 18th and 19th century British women writers meant to draft
a mission statement and hold the first annual conference that time at the University of
Oregon. That mission statement reads as follows in an effort
to encourage further scholarly efforts, including collaboration and discussion.
This conference moves beyond strict literary boundaries and includes presentations
on women’s, political, legal, medical, religious and scientific writing.
Our goal is to truly expand the canon, which means in part, redefining literature.
We support an atmosphere of genuine inquiry and interaction among conference participants
who include graduate students and established scholars alike. Last spring,
the 25th annual conference was held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
and the conference was entitled Generations. It celebrated the accomplishments of the British
Women Writers Association over the previous quarter century as a retrospective
generations considered in what ways we had fulfilled the vision set forth in nineteen ninety
two, how we had grown as a community of scholars, what authors we had recovered,
and our impact on academia at large. A year later,
scholars and graduate students here at the University of Texas at Austin are taking up the gantlet
by staging the twenty sixth annual British Women Writers Conference under the rubric
New Directions. Our call for papers encourage turning to the future
to ask crucial methodological, theoretical and content based questions
about our various fields and asking questions like What do we mean by British,
by women, by writers? We indicated that we would welcome papers and panel
proposals addressing change, development, destabilisation and potential.
In both of both British women writers and the field of British women writers scholarship
envisioning panels focused around the stability of gender, nation
and profession based abstractions, as well as research on individuals living at the margins
of those terms. We further specified our time span as incorporating British women’s
writing between the 18th and early 20th centuries. We received well
over 200 proposals and had been able to accommodate some 150 of them.
Presenters include graduate students and faculty from around Texas. U.T. Austin
south-western, Texas State University. Texas Christian University. Baylor
Reisz, Texas A&M and Southern Methodist University. And across the continental
United States, as well as Canada, Taiwan, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Today, I intend to provide you with a preview of our conference by highlighting some of its chief
interests and concerns and in particular to invite you to one or more of
our three keynote lectures. More on that later. I want to characterize some of our perennial
themes and point toward new and evolving strategies in the interdisciplinary fields
that we bring to bear in our studies of British women writers recovering. That is
uncovering, discovering and publishing or republishing unknown or
little known authors. Ineffect, expanding the canon continues to be one of
our main goals. But now we have innovative technological tools to aid us
all along. Issues of individual identity have been central to our concerns, and now
we are increasingly attuned to questions of national, ethnic, racial, religious,
sexual and gender identity which demand our attention and consideration.
Post-colonial studies at their core emerged from scholarship into the 18th and 19th
century British imperial history, but we’ve only begun to explore their application
to a wide range of genres. Hence the plural term literatures, further requiring
us to steep ourselves in the legal, publishing and political realms we took for
granted. And children’s literature, once thought to be a minor field and
incidentally, primarily the purview of women writers, is now coming to the fore,
revealing new insights to psychological and anthropological investigations.
Here I recommend a panel entitled travelers’ Hobbling Haydn’s and Good
Little Girls. New forms of agency, literary
and cultural criticism in the 21st century has opened up new vistas and the works of
the genesis of many of these evolving critical approaches. Eco criticism
and in particular feminist eco criticism seems especially useful for understanding. Emily
Bronte’s poetry, for example, and I find an especially intriguing title
scheduled Eco feminism is an agricultural act using George
Edgerton’s keynotes and discards to reinterpret Victorian eco criticism
meeting here at the Harry Ransom Center. None of us would take issue with the importance of our KIBEL study
and our conference, says one panel devoted to navigating the archives with three papers
entitled New Frontiers Empire. Pauline Clairemont and Shelley
Godwin Circle distributed authorship and feminist archival Recovery.
Nancy Canards, literary, laborer’s and vanishing Victorians
researching lost British authors in the age of Google. This
last title moves us into the territory of digitalisation and textual editing,
which is addressed in one panel that includes a paper with the provocative title, The Unsaid
Trying to meet the challenges of encoding what manuscripts say without words.
Needless to say, open access is also a topic for discussion. A case where
coöperate co-operative editing and online publishing can offset the trend
toward an unmediated electronic record of our written heritage.
Certainly some paper and panel titles in our conference program employ jargon that
may be mystifying to the uninitiated on a regular basis. I can recall
how the Modern Language Association meetings in New York City prompted the New York Times to gleefully
reproduce what it considered the most outrageous titles, predominantly ones that
betrayed its own preoccupation with sexual topics. Much more on those controversial
subjects later. I would contend, however, that the titles for our conference papers
usually invoke and thereby ground their analysis. Specific
texts and authors and you will be hearing from me about a mixture of the canonical
and non-canonical before my talk has concluded. You might begin to see connections,
potential conversations, as it were, between some of the papers I am citing. For
instance, attention to the female body clearly emerges in the title Unlaced lacing
the body and mind, fashion and feminism in George Edgerton’s keynotes
and discards. You needn’t know that Edgerton is the fantasy up the
pseudonym of Mary Dunn Bright or the Keynotes and Discards
are her first to new woman short story collections to recognize from a previously
cited title that these stories may also hold a key to understanding Victorian eco
criticism. Disability studies have made considerable headway theorizing
contemporary literature. But the conference paper title, Disability and Incarnation
in the Monthly Packet promises that such studies can be fruitfully extended
to a monthly Church of England periodical. In this case, one edited by a woman,
Charlotte Young for almost 50 years, an animal, humanities
or non-human and post-humans studies, which approved a singular speciality for a number
of literary scholars over the last quarter century, are productively employed by several
of our presenters. Witness the Victorian Non-human in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
and one of our keynote topics will connect them to post-colonial interpretations.
I have introduced this talk by referring to some of the history of the of the annual 18th and 19th
century British women conferences, as well as beginning to characterise its ongoing
themes and evolving concerns as they become manifest in our New Directions
conference. I’ve done so partly by citing some of the paper and panel titles for the conference,
and I will continue to spread Sprinkel my talk with other titles to peak your curiosity
and to provide evidence of the kind of scholarship our call for papers elicited.
You can expect to hear about new authors, often hidden behind pseudonyms or plucked
from anonymous attributions and old standbys, most notably Jane
Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. And the works on display
will be both canonical and non-canonical. I will also provide brief overviews
of the scholarly careers of our three keynote speakers and ask you to join me in speculating
about their lectures based on the titles they have provided for us. To conclude my
presentation, I’d like to share with you some of my own contributions to previous British studies,
women conferences, and to demonstrate how conference themes can direct and even
jumpstart a scholarly career and to provide my own spur to new directions.
So what will follow will be three sections with an interlude between Section 1 and 2.
First, we think back through our mothers if we are women. That’s a quote from Virginia
Woolf. Virginia Woolf was quick to recognize what expectations she
raised when she responded to a request by a Cambridge Women’s College to speak
on the subject of women in fiction. Actually, it was two such talks, one
at Newnham and one at Gertten that she combined when she revised
and published her remarks as a room of one’s own in 1929.
At first, she thinks her audience might be interested in, quote, simply a few remarks about
Fanny Burney. A few more about Jane Austen. A tribute to the Brontes and a
sketch of Howorth parsonage under snow somewhat as ISM’s if possible about
Miss Wit Midford, a respectful allusion to George Eliot, a reference to Mrs Gaskell,
and one would have done. But Wolfe and our conference presenters know
that the subject is not so simple. Not only might it mean women and what they are like
are women in the fiction they write, or women in the fiction that is written about them,
or that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together, but that the list is woefully
incomplete. There has been much more detective work since Wolfe’s time
and new techniques and fields of study have been brought to bear to discover the work of so-called
lost women writers. But Wolfe also points us toward considering another
body of lost women writers whom we cannot recover, the ones who might
have been, but never were, the speculative tale she weaves about
an imaginary Shakespeare’s sister. Wolfe goes on to say Anon
or Anonymous. And Anonymous was often a woman, and we have needed to stop
seeing Austen as our singular progenitor as Janet Todd and. Dale
Spender corrected us in the late 1970s by Subtitling one of their anthologies.
One hundred British writers before Austin sorry, one hundred
British women authors before Austin and even Austin can be looked at newly,
as evidenced by the multiple cinematic adaptations of her work and the correct critiques
that surround them, one of which is featured as a New Directions conference paper entitled
Bubble Hearts and Bare Chests in the Manga World of Pride and Prejudice.
Moreover, Austen can be compared to other writers to bring out startling new observations
about pre 19th century novels and their readers. Today, as one paper
entitled New Directions for Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre suggests
a juxtaposition made richer, however, by the fact that Charlotte Bronte disliked
Austins fiction, finding it too narrow and perhaps thereby protesting too
much. Bronte studies continue to cry out for more attention to the third
and youngest sister, and I’m sad to report that she doesn’t figure in any of our program’s
entries. Actually, it’s George Eliot, the male pseudonym of Mary Ann
Evans, who figures most prominently of any author. On our program.
But the directive to consider her Newley keeps those papers from being traditional or mundane.
An entire panel entitled Queer and Feminist Elliot proffers a fascinating
array of papers one Mary Garthe, female bilden or self
cultivation in Middlemarch to an incipient bog woman
Maggie Tolliver’s prognosis in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and three
D Centering The Englishman and the English woman too. Reading George Eliot’s
Alcaraz C. This is Daniel Durand as operatic diva mother after Krenshaw
Crenshaw’s intersectionality. And Kimberly Krenshaw is an African-American
professor of law at Columbia who coined the term intersectionality
to define an analytic framework which attempts to identify how interlocking systems
of power impact those who are most marginalized by society.
Even just putting Margaret all of Phonce name alongside Elliots in a paper title,
as does Victorian exceptions, revision, perception and redemption and all
font and Elliott promises a lively discussion since all of fun showed little
restraint in her envy over Elliott’s success and the personal affront she took to
Elliotts unfortunate choice of title for one of her Westminster Review essays,
silly novels by lady novelists. I will admit to having drawn
attention to titles about novelists and Victorian ones at that. But if I branch
out to mention a couple of or actually three Victorian poets, I can at least widen
my scope a bit. I’m thinking now about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose works
prominently reside here at the HRC and in Bar. But Baylor’s Armstrong
Library collection and his poetry for the common reader most often comes down to her sonnets
from the Portuguese. And how do I love the. Let me count the ways
that’s in reference, of course, to her larger than life romance with her husband and fellow poet Robert
Browning. But there’s so many other sides to Barrett Browning and her poetry
for our conference. I can highlight a panel entitled A Trio of New Approaches
to the Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point with the following papers through
the bars, the poetics of Ratio Reproduction and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s The Runaway Slave
at Pilgrim’s Point. I see you staring at my face, looking at the Liberty
Bell 1848 gift book and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau
poetry versus essays. This litany leads me to the
paper by a pair of co-presenter is queering the Victorian Poetics
of love and marriage. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Field and the Reformation
of Marriage Laws little known outside the field of Victorian poetry.
Michael Field is the pseudonym of an aunt and a niece, Katherine Bradley
and Edith Cooper, who were also lovers. Their accomplishments in the arena
of classic verse drama are only beginning to be properly acknowledged and super
and appreciated in a frank and a conference on Victorian literature. Be
missing a crucial component if their name didn’t appear on the program. Their name
on our program recurs in comparison with another relative unknown, Vernon Lee,
the pseudonym of a new woman novelist and essayist Violet Pasion.
I’ll leave you simply. With that paper title, Venus Francis,
that’s a literary description of a visual work of art and the triadic mode of creation
in Burnley and Michael Field. These references to understudied
British women authors and their work recommend a revisionist approach to compiling
and publishing anthologies and to continually opening up our own teaching syllabi.
And I’ve not yet touched on Irish or Scottish writers are those who are writing in the colonies,
many of which would in the near future become members of the British Commonwealth. Some, even on the
road to independence, race, class and gender. Were the watchwords
coming to the fore in the late 20th century criticism. But some second wave Anglo American
feminists were slow to include race and class in their agenda. That
tragic trajectory has been largely rectified, however, and intersectional feminism
admits masculinity studies to its terrain and reconsideration of the 18th,
century suggests that even periodicity has been rebooted.
And now for the interlude the elephant in the room or the bull in a china shop?
What happened to the alluring terms I set forth in my title subversive, rebellious
and genre busting? I will confess to introducing them partly in response
to Roger’s desire that I jazz it up a little. But they are legitimate terms, both in
describing the women authors and their subject matter in question and explaining how they were
perceived by the status quo. That found them so threatening. Victorian publishers
in particular seemed to think they were being responsive to public opinion by refusing to depict
fallen women or women who were sexually active outside the bonds of marriage
or such women were to appear in print. They certainly couldn’t be allowed protagonist status or have a
happy ending to their tale. But even a relatively conservative woman like Elizabeth
Gaskell, she was the wife of Eugene. You too. You Unitarian
minister. And she refrained from any mention of Charlotte Bronte’s unrequited love for her married
Belgian professor and her Bronte biography. Even Gaskell wrote an entire
novel about a prostitute. Her 1853 novel, Ruth,
is the kind of compassionate social critique that questions punishing the victim of seduction
and stigmatizing little legitimacy, as well as speculating about the possibilities for reintegration
into society. If societal judgment can eventually be satisfied,
despite apparently succumbing to the necessity of her titular heroine dying by
novels, and Gaskell has nonetheless created a heroine with whom her readership
has and empathetically identified surely itself a subversive act.
I look forward to attending a panel devoted to the subject of fallen women and hearing a paper
entitled These Feeble Florets Rereading the Fallen Woman and Gaskell,
Ruth and Ruskin’s of Queen’s Gardens. Is it subversive
to broach the topic of sexuality directly or indirectly? That would seem
to be the case in the Victorian era. More so than in the ribald 18th century and
Regency periods. Who’s published book list boasted titles like that by a scandalous
courtesan? The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson, written by herself.
But if writing about female sexuality with respect to heterosexual relations was subversive,
how much more controversial might we expect? Writing about lesbian relationships to be?
My colleague Lisa Moore is one of many literary and historical scholars
who has been writing about the role of same sex sex attraction in the life and work of 18th
century British women writers. Over the last quarter century and her 1997
study, Dangerous Intimacies toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel,
urges us to look not merely at Austen but beyond to the novels of Mariah Edgeworth
and Sarah Scott. Just as her 2011 book Sister Arts The Products
of Lesbian Landscapes encourages us to encompass the literary and visual art
of Mary Delaney and the poetry of Anna Seyward. I suspect it will not
surprise you to know that Lisa was a keynote speaker at an earlier British women’s conference,
this one held at the University of Colorado in 2012 on landmarks.
Her title, Queer Politics The Lesbian Landscapes of Sonnett History,
marks another step beyond her just previous book. You can anticipate that
more LGBTQ topics addressed will be addressed during our conference
announced by such paper titles as Something Particular Formal Queerness
and Eliza Haywood’s, the British Recluse or Queering Erotic Triangles
in Sense and Sensibility. There’s something about Mary Queering Mary Bennett on
the stage and Queer Temporality for envisioning post Victorian masculinity
in Virginia Woolf’s to the Lighthouse. The Victorian period was responsible
for a decade. The 80s 60s synonymous with a literary subgenre,
the sensation novel written primarily for and by women. Though many of
them were published anonymously or soon anonymously, the popularity of the Sensation
novel reflects both the previously unmet needs it served for both readers and writers,
and the general satisfaction found in breaking traditional boundaries variously
defined in terms of its subject matter infidelity, bigamy, murder
sensation. Fiction was also derided because of its popularity with a population
of readers, a recently expanded by higher rates of literacy and the availability of cheaply
produced print media. The fears expressed in the press came from critics
espousing middle class standards of proper literature and well-written could
not include the prolific output of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, for instance. Never mind the fact
that Dickens and Thackeray and Collins wrote it break next feed to meet the relentless
demands of serial publication. The year nineteen ninety two that marked
the inception of the British Women Writers Association, also self publication of two key
texts about the sensation novel. My colleague and Svet Kasich’s mixed
feelings feminism, mass culture and Victorian sensationalism. And Lynn
Pickett’s The Improper Feminine, The Woman’s Sensation, Novel and New and
the New Woman writing, both of which made Braddon Mrs Henry Wood and
wrote a Broten household names to the Communist Party. I look forward to
hearing the conference papers with titles like Catherine Crowe’s pioneering fiction,
Sensational Scientific Instruction on Meat for Punishment,
Indulging Incompetence and Ellen Woods, The Channing’s and Roland York and
Lady Yardley’s Punishment Policing Gender Performances and Lady Oddly Secret
Sensation Novels, Gothic Fiction, Tales of the Supernatural, all part of popular culture,
all dealing with the emotions, all ripe for application of affect theory and all coming
from and or about uppity women, troublemakers, rebels, potentially
violent ones and genre busters. Our attention was riveted in the late
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Jabbar’s Madwoman in the Attic. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac
in the Cellar. Joanna Rushes How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Phyllis Rose’s
Parallel Lives Five Victorian Marriages. Elaine Show Walters The Female Malady
Women Madness An English Culture 18:30 Agent. 1880 and 2
by Nina Auerbach Women, the woman and the Demon. And Romantic
Imprisonment, Women and other glorified outcasts.
A compendium by Suzanne Hamilton entitled Criminals, Idiots, Women and Miners
Victorian Women by Women on Women was published in the mid nineties and rushed to
reprint before the decade was out. And the most recent volume of this ilk across
my desk is brazen. Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World.
A graphic novel or really selection of Short Stories by Penelope Pageau,
who treats Iconoclasts as role models. And even if only one of them. By
Bli and an American is a writer, they all reflect the indomitable spirit
of the women writers. We will be celebrating during the upcoming event. We called New Directions.
And so I have brought in some books which I’ll leave up here if anyone wants to see
them. At the end of the session, this is the brazen title to the
graphic novel. The next section second set
centerpieces. I’d now like to turn my attention to the three keynote addresses
and one performance, which unfortunately has an attendance limit due to our choice
of venue, but more of its future before I am through. I talk to Casey
about the performance. This is the performance of plunderers or
I guess so we have three king outperformer speeches and one performance.
Our first keynote speaker is Perama Roye, Professor of English at the University of
California at Davis. Her address is entitled of dieties Animals
and the Colonial State. Her research has focused on post-colonial theory and
literatures, Victorian literature, taste and dietetics diet,
and its effects on health and the non-human tern. She is the author of
Indian Traffic Identities in Question in Colonial and Post-colonial India
and Alimentary Tracts, Appetites, Versions and the Post-colonial
and Coeditor of States of Trauma, Gender and Violence in South Asia.
Her current book project, tentatively titled Empires Non-Humans,
seeks to understand the degree to which the nonhuman whether animal, vegetable
to lyric or terrestrial, extraterrestrial, monstrous or spectral
is key to a comprehensive grasp of the imperial world, whether in terms of its
imaginative circuits, its political formations or its bodily registers.
She will be delivering her lecture at 4:45 on Thursday, April 12th in
Belmont Hall. Stimulating an original are two adjectives that recur
in descriptions of her publications. I think we can expect a far ranging discussion
focused on the colonial experience in South Asia during the Victorian period, when animal
imagery was variously employed by the mother country to describe its imperial population.
Our second keynote will be delivered by Jill Galvin, associate professor of English at Ohio
State University and a graduate of planned TEUs program
and the major in English. Jill is a student
in my first English honors class on the Brontes, and I supervised her honors thesis
entitled The Procrustean Bed Literature’s Chronicle of the Suppressed Individual
in Victorian Literature, earning her doctorate at the University of California, Los
Angeles. She began her climb up the tenure track ladder, publishing her first book
under the title The Sympathetic Medium Feminine Channeling the Occult
and Communication Technologies, 1859 to 1919.
Her previous research has focused on long 19th century British media
technologies, spiritualism, mesmerism, psychical research
and both Victorian and contemporary ideas as a post-human. She is currently researching
representations of marriage. Her latest book length project argues that late
Victorian and early 20th century stories of marriage co-evolved with literary
realism. She is also coeditor with Elsie Mitchy of a forthcoming
essay collection, Repotting Marriage in Nineteenth Century British Literature
that reexamines the cultural and formal elements of marriage stories. She
will be delivering her lecture entitled Garden Space Interiority
Marriage and Modern Character at 10:45 on. Friday, April 13th
and the University Teaching Center. I am grateful to Jill for introducing
me to Elizabeth Flint von Arnim, although without knowing about its authorship,
I had seen the film adaptation of her 1922 novel, The Enchanted
April. Some of you may be familiar with the 1992 Academy Award nominated
film starring Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright,
Jim Broadbent and Alfred Molina. And it was also adapted as a Broadway play in 1925,
an American feature film at nineteen thirty five, a Tony Award nominated stage play in
Radio in 2015. How many of you have heard of Elizabeth Dole in Ireland before?
Oh, good. All right. The author was born Marionette Beauchamp
in Sydney, Australia in 1866, raised in London
and Luzon, Switzerland by her first marriage. She became countess on Arnim
Schlager Ensign. And after her second marriage, she was referred to as a Elizabeth Russell.
Countess Russell. Sister in law to Bernard Russell, although known in
her early life as Mary. After the 1898 anonymous publication of her first
book, Elizabeth and her German Garden, she was known to her readers, eventually
to her friends, and finally even to her family, simply as Elizabeth.
That novel, the focal point of Jill’s keynote address, became extremely popular,
reprinted 11 times during its first year of publication with 21 editions
in print. Halfway through the second, her books with only one exception, and that’s
the 1936 autobiographical. All the dogs of my life
were always published anonymously with the merest scriptura by the author of Elizabeth and her German
Garden. One critic describes that first book as, quote, a euphoric him
to nature. In the romantic tradition, its originality and peculiar talent
rest on a character called The Man of Wrath. A benevolent caricature of Elizabeth’s
first husband is a novel of passionate rebellion against established demands,
formal and private, made on married women even by a devoted husband.
A not so banal depiction of a demanding husband is featured in von Arnold’s
later. The publisher, John Middleton Murray, writing to his wife and Von
Van Von Arnold’s cousin, Katherine Mansfield, about the negative reviews of Vera Observed.
Of course, my dear one, critics are faced with a Wuthering Heights written by Jane Austen. They don’t know
what to say. I am sure that you join me in being curious about what Jill
Galvin will have to say about Elizabeth. One on our final keynote speaker
is Susan Lancer, professor emerita of Comparative Literature, English and
Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. Her most recent books are The Sexuality
of History, Modernity and the Sapphic Fifteen Sixty 65
to 1830, which won the American Historical Society’s Joan Kelly Prize.
An honorable mention for the American Society for 18th Century Studies.
Gotch Chok Prize Narrative Theory Unbound Queer
and Feminist Intervention’s co-edited with Robin Warhol, which received honorable mention
for the Narrative Society’s Perkins Prize and Fictions of Authority Woman
Writers and Narrative Voice first published in 1992 and soon to be reissued
by Cornell University Press. President of the American Society for
the 18th Century Studies, Sue will deliver her keynote lecture Narrative
Justice, Gender, Race and the Rescue and Rescue in the age of Austin
at the closing session of New Directions starting at 4:45 on Saturday, April
has been focused within three primary arenas narrative theory and the novel
with a particular interest in women writers, eighteenth century European studies
and gender and sexuality studies, we can expect her to connect the history
of sexuality and race relations, not only in the novels of Jane Austen,
but in representations of the French Revolution as seen from Britain and on the continent.
Several years ago, James Lowland and I had the pleasure of recommending a submission
to Texas studies in language and literature for publication in the journal, then being edited by
Kurt Hind Silman. Entitled Loose Characters and Marry Cowden Clerks
The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. The article introduced me to a female
Shakespearean scholar who, with her husband Charles, produced a concordance
to Shakespeare in 1846 before going on to write a series of novellas under
the general title of the girlhood of Shakespeare’s heroine’s first collected
in a single volume in 1850, and then variously edited and republished
throughout the 19th century. When I was selected to write the essay on life
writing for the Cambridge Companion of Victorian Women’s Writing, I was intrigued by the idea of
considering Catherine Clarke’s novellas as an exercise in speculative life, writing
both in the sense of working with fictional characters and in the sense of trying to recreate
a psychological backstory for an adult, whether real or fictional.
Then, as James and I considered the possibilities for staging the work of an 18th or 19th
century British woman writer for this conference, he hit upon the plan to call upon some of
his students from the U.T. English Departments Shakespeare at Windale program to
perform a staged reading of expert excerpts from Cowden Clarke’s Rosalind and
Cecilia the Friends. The performance will also incorporate material
from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Clarke’s source for the tale. And we’ll conclude
with some discussion about the importance of nineteenth century British women writing about Shakespeare
because the performance will be conducted in the protocell Theater here at the HRC
on the evening of Friday the 14th. Seating is limited and we have to give priority
to the conference participants who are signing up for the event. However, we will circulate.
Casey has it a waiting list in case some
seating becomes available. And if you have an interest as this goes around
and I do have an early not the first edition, but an early edition
of the girlhood of Shakespeare’s heroines. I can show you.
The 4:30 panel that afternoon on Cotton, Clarke and Shakespeare will include
papers by Lauren Byler, author of the TSL article already mentioned
by Kassidy Schultz, a plan to add Windale student Kassidy here. There’s Kassidy in
the back row. And I’d also do we have Austin? Yes. OK.
Austin Hannah, who is going to be one of the performance as well.
And the last paper will be called The Harpy and the Shrew. Shakespeare’s Catarina
and Beatrice in 19th century Britain. And I hope that to when James
returns to us from Los Angeles, where he’s at the Shakespeare Association meeting, we can talk to him about
maybe having another performance of this particular scene and the discussion that
we’re we’re hoping to to advance. And now from my last section
down memory lane, before I conclude with an overview of some of my contributions
to previous, previous 18th and 19th century British women writers conferences,
I’d like to look back a shorter distance to last semester where I taught a graduate seminar
entitled Nineteenth Century British Women Writers and the Dual Protagonist.
When I was designing the course the previous year, I thought it might lead to some paper proposals
for the New Directions conference, and I was deeply gratified that six such proposals
were accepted. Let me now indulge in a listing of them. Diana
Light Diana’s is there reparative
tetrahedron dynamic power relations and Charlotte Bronte is surely
a brilliant extension of her Nasir art and even Cedric’s theory of triangular desire.
Raelynn goes Israeland here. If anybody else from the class is here.
When I start to read your name and titles, this raise your hand. Raelynn
Perilous Prize Mythological Expression of Desire and Power in Mary Barton
and Shirley. And this is a remarkable analysis of mermaid imagery.
Sarah Schuster Narrative Instability as political mediation
in Shirley and Mary Barton, which is a bid for the readers controlled emotional response.
Bree when Maiga empathy and infantilization of the working class
in Mary Barton and this is showing how the status quo is made to prevail at the expense
of equality. Jonathan Silliness? Jonathan Ive nowhere. So back there at one point,
Britannia rule the waves. Britons can be slaves. The Revenge of the
Mistress in Elizabeth Gasol’s Mary Barton A Tale of Manchester Life.
The Failure of an Imperial Nation to Heed Warnings and Danielle Die.
All the wondrous combinations of the Universe, the cosmic and the personal and Daniele
de Rhondda, in which Elliot’s message that everything within her text relates to
everything else is expounded. Although none of these papers deals with
the first and last novels in the course Austen Sense and Sensibility and Mary Chumley
is read pottage, I can say with confidence that their writers not only met the goals I had set
for the course, but they went well beyond them. As I review the papers
I delivered to 13 previous conferences conducted by the British Women Writers Association,
I am first struck by the rich array of themes and topics they invoked in their calls for papers
moving back in time. They include generations making a scene,
landmarks, curiosity, journeys, fresh threads of connection,
female marginalia, annotating empire, speaking with authority
and HRI, or recollecting British women writers. These calls
for papers prompted me to reexamine and intensify my research and understanding
of women writers whose work I had only begun to study and write about. After all, I
had written a dissertation on the soliloquies in the novels of William Make Peace. Thackeray
and its outgrowth in my first book Soliloquy on 19th century fiction, still fell
within traditional lines of narrative and genre criticism. Although even then
I had the foresight to write an epilog featuring the free indirect speech of Austin, Eliot
and Wolf beginning in 1996, my first three papers
were British women writers. Conferences were entitled. She Lies Not Unremembered
and Thackeray Ritchey writes back through her mother’s herself. Her story,
Julia Margaret Cameron’s autobiographical fragment and the multiple D conversions
of any would sort. Those of you familiar with my second book, Creative Negativity.
For Victorian exemplars of the female quest can recognize the seeds of my subject matter
in those papers. Although I did add a fourth figure with Elizabeth Robbins, the
American born actress who relocated to London, where she performed an Ibsen dramas
and went on to write novels. At first, Soudan ominously and plays for the suffrage stage,
calls for conference papers, encouraged scholars to think freshly about their research interests.
To take different perspectives on where we are headed and participating in conferences gives
us an opportunity to share ideas, receive constructive criticism,
and open ourselves to cutting edge work of our colleagues. Conferences generate
new directions and alliances, often leading to future panel groupings, essay
collections and even connections with book publishers. Besides my own papers
at previous British women writers conferences, I have volunteered or been asked to moderate
yet another array of topics, and they prefigures some of my current and future pedagogical
and scholarly agenda. Having edited a critical edition of both Science 1885
autobiographical sketches set me on a course to teach classes on life writing
and to continue exploring the controlof controversial life of the Sont, including her connections
to the even more controversial Madame Blavatsky, founder and first president
of the Theosophical Society. I promised Roger I would meet her, at least at some point.
And am I am only mentioning, I’m afraid that as a result I was alert to a
of them entitled in search of Madame Blavatsky reading esoteric
retrieving the esoteric, which I suspect will aid me in my analysis
of how Blavatsky and Besant, the Sont served as culture critics and theorists
of religion, paving the way for recovery of so-called lost practices that can
aid us in interpreting such ephemeral concepts as memory and the imagination.
Another trajectory signaled by my research for British women writers conferences is my book
in Progress. And oh, and I do have the latest biography of
Andy Besought, written by someone at the Sorbonne who has done the first,
I think, of critical biography that at the same time doesn’t
have an agenda. It is itself writing. Many of the previous biographies
have been either pro socialist and anti thought theosophist or vise versa.
So might my book in Progress, Anonymity, Student Enmity and Femininity about the
advantages and disadvantages personal and for the public. Good for 19th
century women writers who variously concealed and revealed
their identities. Besides including authors, I’ve already written about the Brontes,
Elliot Ritchie and Robin’s. This project will mark my first foray into the poetry
and drama of that two woman team who constitute the pseudonym Michael Field.
I hope this presentation about our upcoming conference and some of the paper and keynote
titles I have cited whet your appetite for attending some of the events sponsored by New Directions
and also for reading more works by the subversive, rebellious and genre busting 18th
and 19th century British women writers. We will be showcasing.