WGSS 48.09 Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers
For the first time in literary history, women writers found commercial and critical success in England during the nineteenth century. Women writers of this time were keen observers of the social codes that formed—and constrained—their identities. Though women wrote in many genres in this period, this course will focus on major novels of the nineteenth century because of the particular strategies female novelists used to open up hard questions about social identity, and particularly social possibilities for women. Questions about gender clearly implicate sexuality, class, ethnicity, race, and power, as well, in complex, compelling, and unexpected ways. We will read works by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, and we will end the class by reading substantial excerpts from the private, unpublished diaries of the women writers who published as “Michael Field.”
Cross Listed Courses
ENGL 62.03