Inventing Feminist Victorianist Criticism

In “Inventing Feminist Victorianist Criticism,” I read Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign (1897) as a text that instantiates key elements of modern feminist criticism, including emphasis on generational historical change, attention to noncanonical genres, and anxiety about literary value. However, WNQVR also highlights other possibilities: unconventional writers, disruptive chronologies, and alternative geographical configurations. In the end, I argue that WNQVR is meaningful not because of its subjects but because of its form; not because it initiated a canon of women’s writing but rather because it began to lay out the way future critics would argue over that canon. If feminist criticism begins here, it begins in productive dissension.