Invisible Women, 1983–2021

one of the many pleasures of attending a symposium¹ where there are no concurrent sessions is the natural, ongoing conversations that arise over its course as panelists connect with each other about their topics, about the challenges of their work, and about the strategies for negotiating them. While many of the writers discussed in the "Women in Book History" symposium were already familiar to me—from Elizabeth Montagu, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Burney to Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft—I also encountered what one speaker termed "a multitude of stars," also called by some "obscure women": women known only to their family circle or their immediate social group. At this symposium, I was the wrap-up speaker in the program; as I listened, I found myself recalling and reflecting on some of my own first encounters some thirty years ago with obscure women writers, evolving methodologies, and our findings back then.

In 1983, the year after I began teaching in an American university, the feminist scholar and science fiction writer Joanna Russ (1937–2011) published How to Suppress Women's Writing. Highlighted by its witty cover art (fig. 1) was the book's ironic attack on the ways in which British and American women's writing—and, by extension, the writing of any marginalized social group—had been systematically explained away. These strategies ranged from denial of agency (women didn't write back then) to declassification (she wrote it, but it's not "art") to diminution (she wrote it, but she had help; or she wrote it, but it isn't any good). The overall effect was to weave a veil of unexamined beliefs about women and other marginalized writers and their writing that, if it did not indeed suppress them, rendered the people and their

Figure 1.

How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, University of Texas Press, © 1983.

work invisible. Sitting in Vancouver in 2018 and thinking about how to sum up this symposium, I found that the ghost of Joanna Russ began whispering to me: does the "invisible woman" syndrome persist, perhaps in slightly different terms, but with similar issues of which we should now be aware?

In 1983, I was just starting to realize the extent to which my future research was to be tied to the recovery of such "lost" voices and texts. Ultimately, this led me to consider the typical stories we tell about women of the past, what we assume, what we think we know before we start our research. What is now called the "recovery" phase of early modern women's literary history in the 1980s and 1990s was, at the time, an urgent research field, in part because of our departments' and universities' persistent denial and dismissal of earlier women's literary works. My tenure case, based on a book about women no one in my department had ever heard of, much less felt obligated to read or teach, was a close squeak. The sheer lack of early modern women in traditional literary histories, their absence from college syllabi and in standard teaching anthologies, created a general air of skepticism about the legitimacy of this line of research, and this was reflected in the often-hostile responses of journal article reviewers and hesitant university-press readers. These conditions created an imperative for documentary research and recovery, the physical display of textual evidence to make the argument that, yes, women were indeed part of early modern English literary culture. This recovery, curating, and editing of women's writings provided the essential platform to make claims that counter Virginia Woolf's imaginative reconstruction of women's literary history. It was not only a few anomalous aristocratic ladies who were culturally permitted to write and read. Indeed, the recovery of texts by women across class lines would fundamentally challenge our notions of what was literary as well as what was historical literacy.

In the archival spaces that librarians, historians, and literary scholars had declared to be devoid of women writers, one of the steps that was essential...