Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
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Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Centur ...

Chapter 1:  Feminism and the Canon: Recovery and Reconsideration of Popular Novelists
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So, we judge quality as a mix of relevance to “important” literary works and categories and the possession of elements pleasing to “cultured” tastes. Difficulty is particularly significant in justifying our work. In doing recent work on noncanonical political poetry of the period, I discovered an amusing difference between poetry scholars and novel scholars of the period. The poetry scholars were shocked I would read something so aesthetically unpleasant. They were not sure why I would put myself through it. The novel scholars treated me with the kind of respect one might give to the monk who chooses to work with lepers instead of tending wine grapes—it is great someone (else) wants to do it. Both groups considered the poetry “difficult” to read, though for interestingly different reasons. Read popular poetry and you are an eccentric hero—or martyr. Read popular novels, and you are self-indulgent. Instead of seeing the apparent accessibility of these novels as a plus, we apologise for it. The poetry, by the way, was no more difficult to read than the prose of many Victorian novelists—whose writing may be a kind of poetry itself.

Mary Poovey raised the whirlwind in 1999 at the British Women Writers Conference (BWWC) by doing a detailed reading of a forgotten popular novelist and then declaring the following:

Do I think that [Ellen] Pickering’s works should be canonised? No, frankly, I don’t. The writing style is inflated, the plots are both torturously complicated and conventional, and the generic innovation is scant at best. Given the limitations of time and financial resources that govern teaching and publishing, reprinting the works of Ellen Pickering would not warrant the expenditure: these novels may help us recover the qualities that enabled a writer to subsist at the margins of popularity in the early nineteenth century, but they do not enhance our understanding of the early-nineteenth-century novel, of women writers, or even of something as amorphous as ideology. Even this observation tells us something, however: it tells us that canonisation, in part, serves abstractions—like “the early-nineteenth-century novel” or “women writers” or “ideology.”