British women's writing, 1847-1949: from Brontë to Bowen
Introduction
This course conducts a study of the works of British women writers from the Victorian era to the end of the Second World War. This was a period of immense social change—most of all, perhaps for women, who moved from having no legal autonomy to gaining the vote and working alongside men in the war effort. The course will examine the responses of women writers to their changing roles and experience, and, more importantly, the way these changes were reflected in new forms of narration and poetic figuration.
A range of genres and styles will be addressed, from Brontë’s fictional autobiography, to the ‘height’ of realism in Eliot’s Middlemarch , to Woolf’s redefinition of the ‘real’ for the modern consciousness. Weekly seminars and tutorials will focus on key texts by the set authors, but will also explore their relation to their literary and intellectual contexts.
Weekly tutorial and seminar programme
Week One - Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
The startling portrait of a passionate individual’s search for love and emancipation, Jane Eyre has become a defining text for students of women’s writing in the Victorian period. We will examine the context of Brontë’s fictional autobiography, and the questions it raises about morality, religion, and the position of women in Victorian society. We will pay particular attention to the novel’s psychological ‘realism’ and its embedded narrative of desire and madness.
Week 2 - Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1859)
The most ambiguous of poems by a puzzling poet, Goblin Market has been described as melding ‘nursery rhyme, religious allegory, sexual fantasy and social criticism’. We will attempt to unravel the poem’s different meanings by reading it in relation to Rossetti’s other works and the poetry of influential contemporaries, including her brother D. G. Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning.
Week Three - George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
Middlemarch was written at the height of Eliot’s creative powers, and is perhaps the greatest example of the Victorian realist novel. Seeking to create a true and sympathetic representation of the real lives of ordinary people, Eliot traces the emotional, moral and intellectual dilemmas of a whole community of characters. We will read Eliot’s masterpiece in the context of her literary aesthetic and her engagement with the philosophical and scientific debates of the period.
Week Four - Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1928)
One of the seminal works of British modernism, To the Lighthouse sought to redefine the relationship of ‘life’ and ‘art’. Woolf rejected realist models of ‘imitation’ in favour of a mode of narrative which took account of the inner reality of consciousness alongside external events. The novel describes a female artist’s struggle to reconcile past and present, memory and loss, ambition and convention. We will study the development of Woolf’s narrative methods, her relation to the visual arts – in particular those of the ‘Bloomsbury’ group – and her radical theories of gender.
Week Five - Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (1949)
Bowen’s novel is set in London in the Second World War. It is a city besieged by bombs, where the dead––‘yesterday’s living’--pervade ‘everything to be seen or heard with their torn-off senses.’ The Heat of the Day has all the ingredients of a thriller—spying, betrayal, blackmail--, but its suspense lies in the emotional tension of its protagonists, and their eerie sense of dislocation. We will analyse Bowen’s unique style, and the uncanny effects created by its reticence. The weekly seminar will supplement this analysis with close-readings of a small selection of Bowen’s short stories. See bibliography below for details.
Field Excursion
The most directly relevant field excursion will be to ‘Monk’s House’, the Sussex home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and ‘Charleston’, the home of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. This will give students the opportunity to see the context in which Woolf and her circle worked, and the extent to which the Bloomsbury ‘aesthetic’ permeated their domestic lives.
Primary Bibliography
Students should aim to have read the following texts in advance of the course. This is particularly important in the case of Eliot’s Middlemarch , which is very long (don’t worry - some of the others are correspondingly short)!
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics, 2003)
- Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’, ‘Life and Death’, ‘An Apple Gathering’, ‘Winter: My Secret’, ‘L.E.L’ in The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 2001).
- George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 2003)
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Vintage Classics, 1998) ------------ ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’, ‘The Mysterious Kôr’, ‘The Demon Lover’ in The ˜ Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (Vintage Classics, 1999)
General Reading
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979)
- Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977/79)
- Angela Leighton, Victorian Women’s Poetry: Writing Against the Heart (1991)
- Gillian Beer, George Eliot (1986)
- Mary Lynn Broe and Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990)
- Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977)
- Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (1997)
- Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel…: Still Lives (1994)
If you have any queries about the above course please feel free to contact dominic.oliver@spc.ox.ac.uk
Dominic Oliver
St Peter's College
New Inn Hall Street
Oxford
OX1 2DL