Not Just Jane

Rediscovering Seven Amazing Women Writers Who Transformed British Literature

Shelley DeWees

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780062394620
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062394637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Education Biographies
• Index: History

"Not Just Jane restores seven of England's most fascinating and subversive literary voices to their rightful places in history. Shelley DeWees tells each woman writer's story with wit, passion, and an astute understanding of the society in which she lived and wrote."

—Dr. Amanda Foreman, New York Times bestselling author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

Jane Austen and the Brontës endure as British literature's leading ladies (and for good reason)—but were these reclusive parsons' daughters really the only writing women of their day? In a witty work of feminist literary history, this fascinating nonfiction debut explores the extraordinary lives and work of seven long-forgotten authoresses, and asks: Why did their considerable fame and influence, and a vibrant culture of female creativity, fade away? And what are we missing because of it?

You've likely read at least one Jane Austen novel (or at least seen a film one). Chances are you've also read Jane Eyre; if you were an exceptionally moody teenager, you might have even read Wuthering Heights. English majors might add George Eliot or Virginia Woolf to this list…but then the trail ends. Were there truly so few women writing anything of note during the dynamic Georgian and Victorian eras?

In Not Just Jane, Shelley DeWees weaves history, biography, and critical analysis into a rip-roaring narrative of the nation's fabulous, yet mostly forgotten, female literary heritage. As the country, and women's roles within it, evolved, so did the publishing industry, driving legions of ladies to pick up their pens. Focusing on the creative contributions and personal stories of seven astonishing women—among them pioneers of detective fiction and the modern fantasy novel—DeWees assembles a riveting, intimate, and ruthlessly unromanticized portrait of female life, and the literary landscape, during this era. In doing so, she comes closer to understanding how a society could forget so many of these women, who all enjoyed success and critical acclaim during their time, and realizes why, now more than ever, it's vital that we remember these foundational voices in women's history.

Rediscover Charlotte Turner Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson, Catherine Crowe, Sara Coleridge, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Not Just Jane finally gives these trailblazing women writers their due, exploring:

• Seven Forgotten Authoresses: Rediscover Charlotte Turner Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Robinson, Catherine Crowe, Sara Coleridge, Dinah Mulock Craik, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon—bestsellers and pioneers in their time.
• Literary History Reimagined: A rip-roaring narrative that blends biography, social history, and critical analysis to explore why a vibrant culture of female creativity faded from memory.
• Genre-Defining Pioneers: Meet the astonishing women who pioneered detective fiction, the modern fantasy novel, and politically charged war journalism long before they were established genres.
• Beyond Austen and the Brontës: An essential feminist history that asks what we've been missing by focusing only on a few famous names from 18th and 19th-century Britain.

END NOTES

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INTRODUCTION

3. “carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden”: Charlotte Brontë, Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2:10.

8. “gentle and kind obedience”: Francis Lye, The Single Married and the Married Happy, Being a Series of Wholesome Advice Designed to Promote the Discreet Union of the Sexes, and Their Mutual Happiness When United (Cheltenham: E. Matthews, 1828), 22, quoted in Hazel Jones, Jane Austen and Marriage (London: Continuum, 2009), 121.

8. “exercise of the most splendid talents”: Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Harper, 1900), 357.

8. “what but domestic misery can be expected?”: Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: Cadell, 1796), 256. Gisborne recommends that women use friendships only “as instruments of comfort, of virtue, and of usefulness,” which leaves no room for connections with any of those husband-hunting females who obsess over “tinsel and glitter.”

9. “children of a larger growth”: Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son and Others (London: Dent, 1984), 66, quoted in Robert W. Uphaus, “Jane Austen and Female Reading,” Studies in the Novel 19, no. 3 (1987): 340.

10. “My mind is worked up”: Diary entry, Jan. 27, 1793, in English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1923), 247. In 1797 Elizabeth’s husband divorced her on the grounds of adultery. Two days later, after the papers were finalized, she married her longtime lover, Lord Holland, and lived with him until his death in 1840. They had seven children together.

10. “a life without external events”: Hans Eichner, “The Eternal Feminine: An Aspect of Goethe’s Ethics,” in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 620, quoted in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 22. Italics mine.

10. strict cosmetic and dietary practices: Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic, 25.

10. for anyone of intelligence it was intolerable: Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (New York: Persea, 1982), 9.

11. “the method’s origins are also tied to France”: Thomas Hodgson, An Essay on the Origin and Progress of Stereotype Printing; Including a Description of the Various Processes (Newcastle: Hodgson, 1820), 77. Stereotyping was used during the French Revolution to issue a form of paper money, the assignat, but due to the shortcomings of the print method, most especially its ability to create like and imitative images rather than identical ones, the assignat was very readily counterfeited. Stereotype printing made great progress, then, in the hands of the French, as they worked to correct this problem by creating cleaner, better-cut plate molds and more efficient machinery.

12. more than twenty thousand titles: Edward Jacobs, “Circulating Libraries,” in David Scott Kastan, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2:5.

13. “They tell us, we mistake our sex”: Anne Finch, The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), 5. The original edition of Finch’s poetry was published in 1713.

21. Susan Hopley was the antecedent: Lucy Sussex, “The Detective Maidservant: Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley,” in Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers, ed. Brenda Ayres (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

21. singular attention to worldbuilding: Matthew David Surridge, “Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy, Part IV,” Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature, 2010. http://www.blackgate.com/2010/09/19/worlds-within-worlds-the-first-heroic-fantasy-part-iv/.

22. “more widely read”: “Mrs. Craik,” Academy, Oct. 1887.

22. novel’s placement just behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Sally Mitchell, Dinah Mulock Craik (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 51.

24. “a critic’s novelist”: B. C. Southam, introduction, in B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critica...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One: Charlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806)
• Two: Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827)
• Three: Mary Robinson (1758–1800)
• Four: Catherine Crowe (c. 1800–1876)
• Five: Sara Coleridge (1802–1852)
• Six: Dinah Mulock Craik (1826–1887)
• Seven: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915)
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Sources
• Bibliographies
• Notes
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher