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Showalter already acknowledges that “[e]ven the good grey Charlotte Yonge has a fiercer side” (137), yet such ambiguities fall foul of neat categories. As a result, they have been chiefly ignored in ideologically driven appraisals that wish to create the nineteenth-century woman author as an inherently subversive, subaltern, protofeminist figure.
Traditional feminist “recovery work” has been crucial in unearthing numerous, once intensely popular, and subsequently largely forgotten works, yet women writers not directly invested in—even averse to—specific agendas have thus additionally been marginalised for disproving an evolutionary model of progressive female self-representation. Such ongoing recuperative projects consequently suffer from what Talia Schaffer has recently termed their “partisan advocacy” (325). Ann Cvetkovich, back in 1992, was among the first to point out that “there has been a tendency [. . .] to assume that noncanonical texts must be proven subversive to be studied,” and that “feminist critics have also been too willing to celebrate popular culture as a voice for female subjectivity” (38–39). The restrictions imposed upon their choice of targets have ironically short-circuited the initial impetus to move “beyond the handful of acceptable women writers to look at all the minor and forgotten figures whose careers and books had shaped a tradition” (xxi), as Showalter was to put it a decade ago in her introduction to the expanded edition of her reprinted 1977 A Literature of Their Own. The parameters of the “acceptable” might have changed repeatedly, but the construction of a literary canon is not, as Showalter perceptively points out, “a conspiracy, but a process determined by a large cultural network” (xxv). As such, it always carries the danger that it loses “sight of the minor novelists, who were the links in the chain” (Showalter 7). Novelists who “publicly proclaimed, and sincerely believed, their antifeminism” nonetheless displayed a “genuine transcendence of female identity” by following their vocation as writers (Showalter 21).
Literary critics have now been able, by looking closely at the individual texts, to explore these antifeminist writers’ careful negotiation of art, work, the domestic, and the public, including the pressures generated by the mass market.