Anti-Feminist Women and Women’s Writing

In a famous passage of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf notes that the early nineteenth-century women writers had no tradition behind them: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.’ The question to be asked about the anti-feminist writers was whether they did think back through their mothers, or whether, as Elizabeth KowaleskiWallace has argued of Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, they were more strongly influenced by complicity with patriarchal traditions and dominant male writers, such as Milton and Dr Johnson. Apart from Mrs Oliphant, who lacked strong male influences in her life, the anti-feminist women discussed here were emotionally or intellectually dependent on certain key men. For Linton it was Walter Savage Landor, her idealized father-figure; for Yonge both her father and John Keble, who read her work, censored it where necessary, and gave permission for it to be published. ‘It does want papa very much,’ she commented on her novel Heartsease which was written after Mr Yonge’s death; ‘but then, he did set it going, and there is mamma to gloat over it. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.