Women Writers ≠ Women Novelists

Novels are fine things. I adore curling up with a good novel, whether in anticipation of the special excitement that comes from reading a novel that I have never read before or the more complex pleasures of rereading a great novel that I have already read many times. In fact, I prepared for my trip to Oklahoma¹ —a state that I have never visited before—by reading a novel I had never read before: Edna Ferber's Cimarron, published in 1930, but chronicling "the opening of Oklahoma" in 1889. Ferber explains that though she did significant research for the book, both in the Oklahoma State House Library and by talking with "a score of bright-eyed, white-haired, intensely interesting women of 65 or thereabouts," her book is not an "attempt to set down a literal history of Oklahoma." "In many cases," she writes, "material entirely true was discarded as unfit for use because it was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fiction." In the non-novelistic world of "true history," on the other hand, Ferber declares, "Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has."²

Ferber's successful career as a novelist, as she appreciated, rested on other kinds of pioneer women, the earlier women novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it also rested on the accomplishments of pioneer women writers of nonfiction who had challenged cultural assumptions about women's capacities to understand the larger world beyond the problems of adolescent courtship and domestic life. Given this invitation to reflect on the twenty-five years of scholarship on women's writing since the first appearance of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in 1982, I thought I would reflect upon one matter that struck me as I read through this scholarship in the course of working on my Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660-1789. This is the still-present temptation to make our history of women's writing a history of women writing novels and the temptation to use novels as the primary source of our imaginative contact with the lives and minds of eighteenth-century women.

I say "our" here speaking as a literary scholar, my original role and one to which I am always happy to return despite occasional excursions into other disciplines. Feminist scholars in other disciplines usually do not succumb to this temptation. Indeed, one advantage of the interdisciplinary character of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is that at these meetings we can—and should—seize opportunities to listen to our colleagues in other disciplines. I have found that the impression of eighteenth-century women's lives that one gets from current work in textile studies or musicology or economic history is remote indeed from the impression one gets from novels. Outside of novels, eighteenth-century women often seem considerably less abject, more aware of adult sexuality, less sentimental, and more knowledgeable about money. This is certainly true, for example, of the women letter writers we meet in Elaine Chalus's Elite Women in English Political Life (2005).³

In considering what I wanted to say, I also went back to reread the article that Germaine Greer published as the lead article in the first volume of Tulsa Studies in 1982, an article entitled "The Tulsa Center for the Study of Women's Literature: What We Are Doing and Why We Are Doing It." It is worth reflecting now on the agenda Greer then outlined. A core task at which she exhorted feminist scholars to labor was to "reconstitute the literary landscape as composed of women as well as men, regardless of the fact that men were always more conspicuous."⁴ This reconstitution would require bibliographical and textual research, the production of good, carefully annotated editions of women's texts, and laborious research into the literary and historical contexts in which those texts appeared. Merely to collect and publish texts written by women, as George Coleman and Bonnell Thornton had done with their Poems by Eminent Ladies in 1755 and as others had done sporadically, including in...