Recovery 2.0: Beginning the Collective Biographies of Women Project

I recently came upon an article that Judith Fetterley published fifteen years ago in American Literary History. Fetterley recalls her recovery of American women writers such as Fanny Fern in her 1985 book Provisions only to find that "10 years later the scene has changed far less than I anticipated."¹ By 1994 the field had expanded to include oral and popular forms and the entire Americas, and scholars continued to make women's works available in new editions such as the Schomburg Library. Yet some of the best recent studies, she notes, disparage or neglect the writings of women. Today, I could repeat Fetterley's retrospective disappointment that so little has progressed. At the same time I celebrate the strides taken in digital studies of women writers as well as in the new periodical studies, book history, and recognition of the transatlantic discourse of sentimentalism, among other developments that have made women's literary history more legible now than it was in 1994. But in the lecture at the seventeenth annual British Women Writers Conference (4 April 2009) from which this contribution to the "Innovations" series is in part drawn, I observed how easily the business of the male-centered canon carries on as usual. And how very easily feminist studies of women may be cast as retrograde rather than innovative.

One of my examples was Katie Roiphe's recent review in the New York Times Book Review of Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, a kind of bookend to A Literature of Their Own, on British women writers, published thirty years before. In the review, Roiphe applies Harold-Bloomesque canonical literary standards with postfeminist condescension. Though she praises Showalter's ambitious and useful volume, Roiphe considers it both too democratic for letting in "women scribblers under every apple tree," and at the same time restrictive: the best women writers didn't want to join a separate female tradition. Roiphe believes feminist reading disregards literary value and plunders texts for their historical and political significance, a "reductionist" practice dating from the "faded era of bell-bottoms and consciousness-raising groups." Roiphe writes, "The idea of resurrecting women's writing from the neglect of previous eras is a project of '70s feminism, but is the mere fact of being a woman and jotting down words in a notebook and then publishing them worthy of quite so many drums and trumpets?"²

In the context of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature I need hardly prove that there's life in the old girls yet. But there is something old-fashioned in Showalter's project. Why did Knopf and Showalter produce a book? Surely in 2009 the platform for such a project is digital. Or at least the book might be enhanced with online resources for those who wish to find out more or to browse and search more effectively. It's true that digital research remains somewhat daunting or foreign to many literary scholars as well as lay readers. Probably Showalter's book, a trade paperback of encyclopedic scale—a kind of update of the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge publications in nineteenth-century Britain as well as of many "great women" anthologies published in the United States since the 1970s—will have more impact on the public perspective on women and writing than a shelf full of scholarly monographs or college textbooks. And yet I see confinement to the print medium as missing an opportunity to make this knowledge most useful. A Jury of Her Peers includes short biographies and short entries on hundreds of writers—I counted over 380 name entries in the online table of contents, though some authors repeat in chapters organized by decade or period. The physical restrictions of a book dictated the brief treatment and sequential and repetitive table of contents. How much more commodious are Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present,³New approaches to European Women's Writing (NEWW), the Brown Women Writers Project, the Poetess...