| Chapter 1: | Feminism and the Canon: Recovery and Reconsideration of Popular Novelists |
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They are hard to sort into neat little categories, and they also change over time. They are, in short, remarkably like people.
Still, after the first impulse to recover lost foremothers—preferably clearly feminist foremothers—there was a period of reflection when scholars thought deeply about these newfound texts in broader terms and built a sophisticated apparatus to address them. But this sense of having “enough foremothers” threatened to elide precisely the women who were often most influential in the period. Popular novelists also suffered the taint of being, well, popular—which meant it was often as hard to argue for them aesthetically as politically. In 1996 Carol Poster deplored the “theoretical turn” among feminist critics that took them away from recovery work and cited Braddon, Ouida, and Corelli as victims of disregard. In her article “Oxidation is a Feminist Issue,” she points out that “while we theorise, unrecovered Victorian women’s writings, printed on acid paper, crumble into permanent and irretrievable oblivion…The consequence of delay will be the permanent silencing of the majority of popular female Victorian novelists by permitting physical disintegration of their novels” (289). Poster’s work was smart and angry and reacted in part to the de-essentialising of the category of the woman author—as she points out, if feminism has nothing to do with women authors, then it is easy to make an argument not to read or preserve them. And of course, she was right—these authors are still institutionally marginal, though less so. As she wrote in 1996,
My own book on Ouida, Braddon, and Broughton came out, coincidentally, in 1997.