239137 A Voice of Her Own: The Woman Question in British Women´s Fiction: 1860s - 1920s (S) (WiSe 2011/2012)

Women writers in Victorian England engaged with the serious disadvantages women suffered in the context of the dominant gender ideology. In their novels, they charted the conditions of female development in a society that regarded women as inferior to men; their love plots fantasized about, and at the same time criticised, notions of romantic love. Later in the century, authors questioned gender models and the institution of marriage quite radically, and in the early 20th century, they engaged in teasing out the consequences of modernity and the new approaches to the human psyche in both their themes and styles of writing. In this seminar, beside discussing the conditions of female authorship in the period under consideration, we will trace the development of women writer's engagement with questions of femininity in three novels and a number of short stories. The novels are: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860); May Sinclair, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). The Short stories are mainly from the 1890s, written by Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Charlotte Mew and Olive Schreiner.

Please note:
This course and Prof. Schwarzkopf's course on "The British Women's Movement, 1865-1928" (Mo, 14-16) complement each other. Students may find it helpful to attend both classes, though there is no obligation to do so.

Bibliography

Please buy your own copy of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse – I strongly recommend the Penguin Classis (or Penguin Modern Classics) versions, which are annotated. May Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriett Frean and the short stories will be made available in a reader at the beginning of the semester