The phenomenon of the woman reader and the woman author dates from at least the eighteenth century, and for a minority of women from much earlier. But statistically, women’s literacy expanded from the early nineteenth century, providing a new readership for the printed word. In due course, the number of women writers expanded to match. Again, there is a European dimension to be explored: the old republic of letters now had more women citizens, across the entire continent, and they sometimes read very widely:
I have read since Xmas the D[uke] of Marlboro’s Apology, Burnet’s History, ye XIII. Satire of Juvenal, Hearne’s Travels into N. America, Smith on ye figure and complexion of ye human species, Bancroft on dying, some desultory chemistry, Roderick Random, Lazarillo de Tormes, Leti’s Life of Sixtus V, various German and French plays, novels and trash, Cook’s Third Voyage, Wolf’s Ceylon, part of Ulloa’s Voyage and some papers in ye Memoirs of ye Exeter Society. Frequent dippings into Bayle, Montaigne, La Fontaine, Ariosto. Read ye 3 first books of Tasso; Ld Orford’s works.
Elizabeth Vassall, Lady Webster as she was in 1798, later Lady Holland (1771-1845), was the first to admit that her reading was disorganised, and she was ashamed of herself for reading French novels. Still, this diary entry for 1798, when she was twenty-seven, shows a great breadth of European reading matter. She was of course an educated, privileged and well-travelled Englishwoman.38 Her French nearcontemporary, Manon Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754-93), the daughter of a skilled artisan, more or less educated herself after a conventionally pious upbringing. Her reading, equally varied, was far more disciplined and serious, concentrating on philosophy. But both were readers in an age when women’s literacy in particular was beginning to take off. It was still a matter of class. R. A. Houston reports that in the mid-eighteenth century, only 20 per cent of bourgeois women in Lyon were illiterate, but 50 per cent of the wives of artisans and 80 per cent of women in the lowest classes could still neither read nor write - and these figures were among ‘the most favourable in Europe’.39 Most commentators agree that northern Europe was more advanced in this respect for both sexes, partly because of literacy campaigns, such as the one the Protestant churches organised in Scandinavia - though these concentrated on reading, not writing.
The woman reader was, however, becoming a more familiar figure. Citing a painting by Chardin, The Amusements of Private Life, Roger Chartier argues that in the eighteenth century the iconography of reading became female and secular, whereas previously it had been almost entirely male and religious.40 And, already, by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the female novel reader had become the epitome of the misguided reading public. . . she was depicted as filled with delusive ideas, swayed by false ideas of love and romance, unable to concentrate on serious matters’, all of which would lead to no good. Even the austere Manon Phlipon, who wrote at age twenty that she despised novels, was bowled over by Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise when she first had it put in her hands, and read it many times; she was fond too of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe.41 These massive best-sellers were novels of sexual love sacrificed or betrayed. Private life, as in the Chardin painting, was believed to be where women’s interests exclusively lay, and women were quickly identified as light fiction readers. But this received view of women’s habits was a stereotype allowing for many exceptions. Brewer claims for example that Anna Larpent, a well-to-do but not aristocratic wife and mother, was exactly the sort of ‘common reader’ whom Dr Johnson, a critic of novel-readers, wished to see. Her reading included history, biography, belles-lettres and philosophy, and she ‘constantly’ read the Bible.42
The improvement in female literacy in the nineteenth century was dramatic, particularly after about 1830-50, partly because of better schooling. As George Sand (pen-name of Aurore Dudevant, 1804-76) put it: ‘We learned to read in order to become capable of talking with educated persons, in order even to read the books we had in the cupboard, and kill time in the country and elsewhere’.43 Although girls’ education did not in most cases offer much beyond basic reading, writing, religion and domestic skills, it did increase the readership of print culture. Whereas in 1801, only 28 per cent of Frenchwomen over fourteen were literate, by mid-century 52 per cent of women could read (compared to 68 per cent of men) and by 1901 (after the introduction of universal primary education) 94 per cent of women were literate compared to 96 per cent of men.44
If we look beyond basic literacy towards the educated classes, one fact about women’s reading ability stands out: awareness of other European languages. In an age when most boys were taught the ancient languages at school and often acquired other languages through travel, it was less common to find girls being taught Greek and Latin, although the famous Madame Dacier (1647-1720) had translated the Iliad in 1699. But many women, as well as men, learnt modern languages, especially (depending where one started from) English, French, Italian and German. ‘Almost all educated people in Europe read French’ in the late eighteenth century, remarks Norman Davies.45 There was such a thing as ‘European culture’; travel around Europe was (in the intervals between wars) more possible. Those who knew several languages could be influential in cultural exchange, particularly between Continental Europe and the English-speaking countries, where most readers were less likely to be bilingual.
If one is looking for a truly European intellectual in the years around 1800, man or woman, Madame de Stael, nee Germaine Necker (1766-1817) would be a striking example. She had a head start, being the daughter of two remarkable people: her Swiss father Jacques Necker had been Louis XVI’s popular finance minister until his resignation in 1781. His recall and sacking in 1788-9 helped precipitate the storming of the Bastille. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod, was a writer who held a salon in Paris where Germaine was brought up. A brilliant and controversial essayist in her youth, de Stael lived either in Paris or in Coppet on Lake Geneva through most of the Revolution, being a moderate republican, like her lover Benjamin Constant. Banned from Paris by Napoleon, she formed a Coppet circle, which became one of the central points of cultural exchange in Europe. It included Wilhelm von Schlegel (who tutored her children) and the Swiss historian Sismondi. De Stael knew and had visited Goethe, Schiller and other German writers, and herself published two famous novels: Delphine (1802) and Corinne ou I’ltalie (1807). The epigraph to Delphine reads: ‘A man must know how to brave public opinion, a woman how to submit to it’. Her brave, reckless, but finally tragic heroine proceeds to defy this and asserts the value of individual freedom. This was the book Napoleon did not like. Her literary style was not particularly elegant, but the content of her works was bold and intelligent, and she was ahead of her time in many ways. In all these respects, she was perhaps the Romantic era’s equivalent of Simone de Beauvoir. Germaine de Stael did not publish translations as such, although she was multilingual. But she wrote enthusiastically about translation and urged people to make more translations available of modern works rather than ancient. ‘Byron and his generation had not read Goethe’s Faust in German but in the abbreviated French version contained in [de Stael’s] best-selling De I’Allemagne.’46
Educated women with knowledge of the languages and customs of other countries, could contemplate translation. To translate for publication was often to take a first step into the republic of letters, and was already an acknowledged occupation for the aspiring woman of intellect. Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola had translated Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy into Italian in 1722, and Emilie du Chatelet had published an acclaimed translation of Newton’s Principia into French in 1759.47 Of the ‘Muses’ cited at the start of this chapter, no fewer than six - Carter, Barbauld, Montagu, Griffith, Lennox, More - are known to have translated from French, Latin or Italian, while Kauffmann was a cosmopolitan artist originally from Switzerland, and Linley and Macaulay almost certainly knew languages, though did not publish translations. By the nineteenth century, translating was sometimes seen as a ‘woman’s occupation’, perhaps for the obvious reasons that few other professions were open to a well-educated girl and that it could be done at home, hidden under a piece of needlework, as Jane Austen claimed to hide her writings, or combined with domestic tasks. In her diary for 28 March 1839, Lady Charlotte Guest (1812-95), the translator of the Welsh collection of tales The Mabinogion recorded: ‘Today I worked hard at the translation of Peredur. I had the pleasure of giving birth to my fifth child and third boy today’.48 It was also sometimes a family occupation. Karoline and Dorothea, the wives of the
Schlegel brothers, were both translators thought to have contributed to the translations of Shakespeare by their husbands.49
The overwhelming majority of published translations were, however, by men. But the expansion of the reading public and the community of writers over the century saw the rise of the professional translator, female as well as male, commissioned by a publisher. If we take translation into English as the focus, women were, unsurprisingly, more likely to be translating fiction, history, biography and religious writing from French or German than they were to be tackling classical or oriental texts or philosophical or political works. But their number was rising. A very approximate survey of translations into English, based on the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, yields the following figures: in 1830, about 70 per cent of translations were attributed to male names, 4 per cent to female names, 16 per cent to translators of unknown sex (initials only), and some 10 per cent were published anonymously. By the end of the century, in 1890, these figures had shifted to respectively 75 per cent, 16 per cent, 2 per cent and 7 per cent (fewer ‘unknowns’ since fuller names appear in the source).50 By then too, there were women who were full-time translators with a degree of recognition. Clara Bell (1834-1927) translated at least fifty-six full-length books between 1857 and 1906, mostly from German but also from French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. English-speaking readers of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov were for many years ‘listening principally to the voice of Constance Garnett’.51 Garnett (1862-1946) read Classics at Newnham, but taught herself Russian, alone at first, later in consultation with native Russian-speakers. Choice of text might reflect a more independent political stance too. Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling (1855-98) who was already fluent in German, having co-translated her father’s work, learnt Norwegian in order to translate Ibsen, and in particular A Doll’s House, one of the key texts for the New Woman. Even then however, women sometimes concealed their identity. When translating works of dubious morality, such as any French novel, a male pseudonym might still be advisable. The chief translator of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine in the Dent edition (1895-8) was Ellen Marriage (1865-1946), but for some of the more risky volumes she signed her work ‘James Waring’, according to one of Dent’s employees.52
Despite, or perhaps because of its availability to women, translation was in terms of the cultural field, a ‘minor genre’ and one that had a downside. Then, as now, it was seen as a lesser activity within the cultural field, dependent at best, close to hack writing, journalism and Grub Street at worst. In Sweden, for example, ‘a considerable number of translators in this period were women’ and that went along with the view of the translator as ‘humble craftsman, lacking the aura of the romantic genius’.53 If women could engage in it, that was because certain critical gate-keeping mechanisms, especially as regards posthumous reputations, did not operate here as strongly as in creative writing. Many of the works women translated were popular in their time and therefore commissioned by publishers, but have faded from the view now. A certain number were by women authors, and it is sometimes argued that the translation of works by other women represented a network of mutual support. The novels of the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer (1801-65) for example, of which it was said ‘no foreign novels. . . have attained such popularity in this country’, were devotedly, though apparently not always accurately, translated by Mary Howitt. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was first translated into French by a collaborative team,
Louise Belloc and Adelaide de Montgolfier, ‘a striking example of collaboration and promotion of progressive literature’.54
Translation could also been seen as deliberate self-effacement, a substitute for autonomous writing. It enabled a woman to reformulate the words of eminent male writers, to remain at one remove from literary creativity. Sarah Austin (1793-1867), who translated important texts by German and French historians and philosophers, such as Ranke, Niebuhr, Guizot and Cousin, said she felt secure ‘behind the welcome defence of inverted commas’.55 Many of these women never made the jump to writing under their own names. On the other hand, translation could certainly be an apprenticeship in writing, a path often taken by women fiction or essay writers, offering a first chance to write for publication without commitment and sometimes without acknowledgement. George Eliot’s early publications were translations of German and Latin theological treatises by Feuerbach and Strauss; she also tackled but did not publish Spinoza’s Ethics. French writers who also translated include Louise Belloc (1796-1881), Sophie Ulliac-Tremadeure (1794-1862) and Therese Bentzon (1840-1907) who introduced Twain, Whitman and Henry James to French readers: all three wrote novels themselves.56 And it is to the nineteenth-century woman writer that we now turn.
The seventeenth century had already seen the visible emergence of the woman writer. Dominique Godineau points out that twice as many novels by French women authors were published between 1685 and 1702 than between 1660 and 1684, but fiction was precisely an undervalued genre. Women writers were tolerated in France at this time, she suggests, ‘if they called themselves amateurs and stuck to lightweight genres’. By the end of the eighteenth century, with a huge rise in production of writings by women, la femme auteur even became a bogey. Mme Roland, who wrote a great deal privately in her youth, dreaded the idea of publishing anything: ‘I would eat my fingers before becoming a woman author’. She went on to say:
I saw very early on that a woman who earned this title lost more than she gained. Men don’t like her, and her own sex criticises her: if the works are bad they are mocked, if they are good, they are stolen from her [i. e. attributed to someone else.]57
Mary Brunton, a Scottish novelist who published anonymously, wrote in 1810: ‘My dear, I would sooner exhibit as a rope dancer’.58 Even Mary Wollstonecraft, who considered herself one of a new genus, earning her living by the pen, began with ‘translations, reviews, pastiche, works aimed at the expanding market for schoolroom books for growing girls, historical commentary and travellers’ observations, eked out by. . . articles to form some sort of livelihood’, not always over her own signature.59 But by then, in the decade of the 1790s, Carla Hesse argues, the quantity of works of all kinds published by women in France was so voluminous as to constitute ‘the other Enlightenment’, and she insists that they published in every field: ‘from political pamphlets, history, philosophy and educational treatises to novels, plays and poetry’.60
Fiction, however, was the dominant area in which - then as now - most women published. But so did many men. That did not prevent it being considered a lightweight genre. Jane Austen, in a famous passage in Northanger Abbey (1803) felt she needed to come to its defence:
While the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England. . . are eulogized by a thousand pens, there seems to be almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them.61
For whatever reason, several early nineteenth-century women novelists let it be thought they were men, publishing either anonymously, with neutral initials, or under a male pseudonym. George Sand claimed it was at first to avoid annoying her mother-in-law, but thereafter, she says, she claimed the name as a hard-won identity. Daniel Stern (Marie Agoult) and George Eliot (Marian Evans) are other obvious examples, and the Bronte sisters chose what they thought were ‘ambiguous names’: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.62
Library catalogues indicate that significant numbers of women were publishing books all over Europe, mainly but by no means exclusively, fiction. But only a few of their names - and most of those English or French - are rated alongside the major male writers of the age. Feminist historians have argued that this seriously underestimates their place in the record. Joanna Russ, in an unassuming but sharp little book in 1984, argued that if a woman had written a book, there were critical strategies for eliding this from memory:
She didn’t write it. She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but ‘she’ isn’t really an artist and ‘it’ isn’t really serious, of the right genre - i. e. really art. She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. She wrote it, but it’s only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason. She wrote it, but there are very few of her.63
How accurate is this? Social conditions and publication outlets differed widely from one country to another in nineteenth-century Europe; it mattered a good deal which language one wrote in, and whether it was translated. In Italy, the novel itself had not been a dominant genre until the mid-nineteenth century. Writing of Matilde Serao (1856-1927), a prolific and well-known Italian writer, believed to have been considered for the Nobel Prize in 1927, Lucienne Kroha says that there were ‘no Jane Austens etc.’ to provide role models for the Italian women writers, ‘just beginning to emerge as a group’ in the later nineteenth century. The only trailblazer was the male writer Alessandro Manzoni, whose I promessi sposi, Italy’s first modern novel, was written in the 1820s.64 In Sweden, the key pioneer, somewhat earlier, was Frederika Bremer, well known throughout Europe during her lifetime, especially for her novel Hertha (1856), a book credited with changing Swedish law on the status of the single woman. (‘She wrote it, but there are very few of her’.)65
The fact that women in both north and south Europe found it hard to break through the posthumous fame barrier suggests that we do not necessarily have to accept the idea, originally suggested by Queenie Leavis, that those who did were helped by their Protestantism and the freedom their heroines enjoyed.66 Olwen Hufton notes that the small populations of some cultures, and the lack of publishers able to take risks, meant that much publishing in Holland and Scandinavia, for example, consisted of translations from English and French, and that this marginalised all national writers.67 But we can, when considering the cultural field as a whole, note that European women were writing in a variety of genres, including journalism, diaries, letters and memoirs, often regarded as less significant and remaining unpublished for some time. Such authors and works did not get much serious attention until the outburst of women’s studies of the late twentieth century. (‘She wrote it, but it isn’t of the right genre’.)
One example of an unpublished text - from the eighteenth century as it happens - is the diary of a middle-class Swedish woman, Christina Hiarne, covering the years 1744-1803. The diary is concerned to a large extent with domestic life. (‘She wrote it, but look what she wrote about’.) But it goes beyond these details, both in subject matter and in the shaping of the diary as narrative. The writer made subtle revisions to the text in her later years, turning it from a daily record into a structured ‘fair copy’, moving towards autobiography, of a more literary kind. After a vivid account of her distress over choice of husband, she tells of her decision to leave it ‘in the hands of the mother and God. . . [My mother] became quite friendly and happy and at once made me a present of half a dozen teaspoons’. Jane Austen does not seem so far away.68
While in Sweden the point of the early literacy campaign was to enable people to read the Bible and be more informed Christians, as in Hiarne’s case, what women read would influence what they wrote. It has been argued for instance that in the Germanspeaking culture of the early nineteenth century, women were particularly encouraged in the ‘new domestic family’ to read texts relating to matters of the heart: ‘the educated man can and must know and read everything; it is only fitting for educated women to know that which can afford poetic delight’.69 Schoolgirls were encouraged to read lyric poetry, but while many may have written verse, relatively few women poets were published. Of course what they really did read has to be surmised from a good deal of scattered evidence. And some German women were among the most advanced thinkers of the time. The ‘German George Sand’, novelist Fanny Lewald (1811-89), was in touch with the avant-garde of the day: ‘Heine’s pictorial account of his travels and the state of affairs in France. . . spoke a language as yet unknown in Germany. . . we greeted all those early works of the so-called Junges Deutschland with surprise and enthusiastic approval’. In fact Lewald was a slightly later example of a phenomenon perhaps unique in Europe: the presence in the salons of Berlin between about 1790 and 1830 of a group of intelligent and educated women, mostly Jewish, connected to some of the male writers of the day, but also interested in female emancipation. They included Rahel Levin, later Varnhagen, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, Henriette Herz and others. Their undoubted talents did not, however, often find its way into print, except in letters, to be appreciated in later ages.70
Spain is an example of a European country where women writers were undoubtedly at work, but where they have appeared either to have published few significant items, or to have been eclipsed and forgotten. These two factors may work together. Janet Perez, surveying the question, has pointed out that there was only limited scholarly interest in any works by women in Spanish until the very late twentieth century. Yet one bibliography in 1880 listed 390 women writing across a range of genres, including fiction; another in 1903 listed 1,100 ‘women authors’. The first modern survey of nineteenth - and twentieth-century Spanish women’s writing was produced only in 1986.71 As in several other countries, there tends to be a single woman writer who is admitted to the canon: in Spain this was Emila Pardo Bazan (1851-1921), who is credited with having introduced naturalism to Spain. (‘She wrote it, but in this case there was only one of her’.)
In the twentieth century, in Spain as all over Europe, many more women writers have achieved reputations, yet even now those who are accorded major status is limited. The Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded annually by the Swedish Academy, is not an infallible guide to literary durability, but it does give some pointers to eminence. Of the ninety-odd Nobel Prizes for Literature since 1901 only nine have gone to women, of whom six are European. While they are all writers of note, their names may not be very familiar to English-speaking readers: Selma Lagerlof (1909), Grazia Deledda (1926), Sigrid Undset (1928) Nelly Sachs (1966 joint), Wislawa Szymborska (1995), and Elfriede Jelinek (2004), a slightly less mainstream selection than the male line-up. If feminists had been giving out Nobel prizes, they might have suggested a few other Europeans such as Colette, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Christa Wolf, Anna Akhmatova and Muriel Spark.
It is also possible, as a footnote to this discussion, that they might have suggested some names from authors of children’s literature: a massive branch of publication, not necessarily dominated by women, but where women could publish with perhaps even less training outside the home. It is of course regarded as a lesser genre (‘look at what she wrote’) and rarely included in mainstream histories of literature. Yet most of us who are passionate readers owe our initiation to books by writers for children - both men and women. The female line could stretch from the Comtesse de Segur, via, among many others, Anna Sewell, Catherine Sinclair, Johanna Spyri, Beatrix Potter, Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson to J. K. Rowling. Many twentieth-century European girls - Simone de Beauvoir for one - read American classics such as Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women (1869) or Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872), critical providers of positive role models for rebellious souls.72
In conclusion to this section, the nineteenth century did see a huge expansion of women’s membership of the republic of letters. There are some obvious reasons for this. Improved literacy laid the foundation, and once that was acquired, the fact that writing is an activity requiring no formal qualifications, such as university degrees, made it an activity open to people with relatively little formal cultural capital. The mechanisms for being published were broadly speaking in the hands of men, to be sure: periodicals, magazines, newspapers and publishing houses. But anyone, man or woman, could send in a manuscript. And while the female journalist would be a largely twentieth-century phenomenon, already many women published articles, book reviews or serials in European newspapers and periodicals (Blackwoods, the Edinburgh Review and so on). The existence of a female readership made the century one in which the novel became a leading genre, never thereafter displaced. But women also provided a public for poetry, as well as a few noted poets: Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. In particular, an army of girls and women wrote privately some form of journal, diary or memoir, some of which were only later discovered and re-evaluated. One example is the precocious and lively Marie Bashkirtseff (1860-84), a Russian emigree in France, whose voluminous and frank Journal was intended for publication, after her early death, but has still not been fully transcribed. On the other hand, one of the most widely read and translated European texts of the twentieth century was the moving private diary of the Dutch teenager Anne Frank, not originally intended for publication at all.
World History
