Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen

by Dale Spender

The printing press was invented in 1450 but it took nearly 300 years before the idea of ‘fiction’ (rather than lying) was accepted. And then it was women who took over the form and made it their own. Not that these women – who were denied education – were acknowledged by the male literary establishment.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the first to be hugely successful: she had more than 70 publications to her name and many of them were concerned with women’s rights to sexual freedom. One of her novels - Oroonoko (1759) was based on her trip to the West Indies, and is accepted as the first novel that was about the abolition of slavery!

Delarivière Manly (1663-1724) was the mistress of the scandalous political novel who made much use of ‘carelessly dropped letters’ in her numerous publications. Eliza Haywood (1693 -1756) a prolific writer and best seller (more than 60 publications) - introduced the first non-aristocratic heroine in English literature in the form of Miss Betsy Thoughtless: Betsy not only discussed the issue of pregnancy termination with her female friends, but posed the moral question of whether a wife was entitled to leave her husband - if he was boring. The answer was yes!

Fanny Burney 1752-1840 was the bestselling author for decades (Evelina) and Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) wrote more than 10 novels where the heroine was a mature woman with a rotter of a husband! Nothing like it ever before!

This was the tradition –along with 195 other wonderful women writers -that Jane Austen inherited. It was one where the only education that women could access outside their own experiences, was through the writing of these daring and inspirational authors. No wonder Jane Austen’s books were self help guides for finding the right husband!

dale spender spent two years in the London Library removing every work of fiction from the shelves to find these forgotten women. It was an eye-opening experience to know that with such limited resources, women had achieved so much – and gained so much enjoyment from their creativity.

It’s all here in this readable and often ‘racy’ book – where each of the 200 MOTHERS OF THE NOVEL and their works are listed. The inner lives and struggles of women are revealed – at a time when they had no other options than to become wives. It’s women’s version of women’s history.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Feminism, Womens, Books About Books, Womens Studies

357 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Dale Spender (born 1943) is an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant.

Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, a niece of the crime writer Jean Spender (1901–70). The eldest of three, she has a younger sister Lynne, and a much younger brother Graeme. She attended the Burwood Girls High School, in Sydney. In her youthful days she was a Miss Kodak girl. In the later half of the 1960s she also taught English Literature at Dapto High School. She started lecturing at James Cook University in 1974, before going to live for a while in London and publishing the book Man Made Language in 1980.

She is co-originator of the database WIKED (Women's International Knowledge Encyclopedia and Data) and founding editor of the Athene Series and Pandora Press, commissioning editor of the Penguin Australian Women's Library, and associate editor of the Great Women Series (United Kingdom).
She is the author of a witty literary spoof, The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys, 1991 Grafton Books, London, a feminist critique of women's lives in 17th Century London, purportedly written by Elisabeth, the wife of Samuel Pepys.
Today Spender is particularly concerned with intellectual property and the effects of new technologies: in her terms, the prospects for "new wealth" and "new learning". For nine years she was a director of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in Australia and for two years (2002–2004) she was the chair. She is also involved with the Second Chance Programme, which tackles homelessness among women in Australia.

Reviews

[notgettingenough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update:

One of the ways in which feminism has enthusiastically practised sexism is in the denial of the arts of their gender. So that there was a period where it was de rigueur to be contemptuous of knitting, sewing, etc etc etc, arts practised by women, but by definition not art according to men, that gender having defined what art is, and by making it things that aren’t useful, thus having denied the very existence of women as artists. A brilliant move on their part which ‘feminists’ upheld for a long time. I decline to define myself as a feminist, thus escaping the frequently sexist nature of that ism. The logic was that they were denying that there was anything of value in the lives of their downtrodden mothers. Apparently that was a feminist, rather than a sexist, position.

Let’s suppose they have moved on from that fatuous stand. Have they? I hope so!

I’m at a knitting group, talking to a girl whose postgrad work was in the area of the pre-Mothers of the Novel. Before the Novel came into existence and women took it over as one of their artforms, their writing is hard to come by. But it is there. In the sixteenth century educated women in particular wrote letters and one form was particularly poignant. They would write to their children before they went into labour as they were such a good chance to die. Often they would urge their children to accept whatever replacement their husbands made for them, women being domestic labour which needed to be replaced upon its death.

Now women and their babies to be largely survive, but I have noticed on the internet directions to patterns for premature babies (normal baby patterns are too small for them) and patterns for babies that die at birth. How sad is that?


----------------

I wonder how many of you who have been so derogatory here of writing that isn't to their taste realise how important women are to the novel. But for reasons which Spender discusses at length men have erased them from the very idea of literature by defining it in a way that excludes female writers and nothing much has changed, I'm surprised to see.

I have gotten involved in attempting to defend writing that isn't considered worthy of giving the time of day to here on goodreads. Dale Spender explains what is going on in an illuminating way.

Quoting my own book which is in my writings should you happen to wish to read more....

If Tompkins’ concern is to question our definition of literature in order to place Franc’s genre in the literary canon, Spender’s is to question our notion of literature in order to place women back into it. It is an eye-opening critique of the literary canon and literary criticism. Like Tompkins, by putting these back into a historical context, she establishes a tradition of female writers whom she judges as ‘good’ dating back to the very beginnings of the novel. It is clear from her work that this form of writing had not fathers, but mothers. Yet since last century these have been expunged from the records. The literary canon has denied their existence and attributed the development of the novel to men. Again it is tempting to quote Spender at length on this matter since it is germane to a consideration of Franc’s genre.

It is a process at work. By making literary criticism transhistorical it has been possible to remove women altogether from literature. By putting it back into history it is not only possible, but essential, to make women an important part of literature. In the 1700s women were the pioneers of the novel. The majority of novels were written by women, it was women who experimented with form and structure. It was the practice for male writers to take female pseudonyms, this practice reversing itself in the mid-nineteenth century.

This is no great surprise when one puts literature back into history and considers the position of women. As Spender puts it:

Of course, one of the reasons that the women novelists were so successful is that their books met the needs of the women readers. Excluded from so many social, politicial and economic activities, often isolated and not infrequently at a loss to know how to lead a meaningful life, many women seized upon women’s novels as an entry to a new dimension of understanding – and living. To represent the woman reader of the late eighteenth century as a bored and listless woman who idled away her time with sentimental novels is to do great disservice to the readers – and the writers. (It is also to reveal how we can be taken in by myths constructed long after the event, and which discredit women.) For so many women, these novels meant access to the world of ideas, to self-analysis and social issues. These novels were women’s intellectual foodstuffs. And women writers not only ‘exploited’ their role as letter writers, when they created the novel; they became the connecting medium for the experience of women.

Ideas, understandings, new realisations and questions spread among women as quickly as the publishers could get them into the hands of women (and men). These ‘women’s novels’ to some extent constituted ‘women’s education’ and were nothing short of subversive in their own context. And it is understandable that this new, exciting literature should have been so often and churlishly condemned by many men. Once the ‘women’s novel’ was so widely available, there is no doubt that women were more difficult to subordinate.

I think this also helps to explain in part why these women novelists have been suppressed.

Given this, it is scarcely a surprise that literature written by women is bound to moralise, judge, comment – not merely to observe, but to attempt to change the course of history. One way or another those without power, those who are not in a privileged position, will not only want to, but need to, do this. It is equally unsurprising that it is men historically who perceive literature as something that watches. There is nothing much for them to want to change.

At the same time, however, it is men who are the judges of literary worth at every step. Spender quotes Woolf on the consequences of this:

When a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values – to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important. And, for that, of course, she will be criticised; for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from his own.

It is not only how the female writer may wish to look at the world that causes these difficulties. It is also what they look at:

...with the first step of the first professional woman writer into the world of women, we encounter the dilemma that has confronted women writers ever since. If they choose to explore their own experience of the world, if they elect to concentrate on the world as it is viewed by women, they are....by definition producing substandard work. This has nothing to do with the quality of their writing – or the quality of the world they choose to depict – but is a value judgment, pure and simple, about their limited, inferior, and insignificant subject matter.

Because, as so many women have written, the sanctioned business of woman’s life has for so long been to ensure a livelihood by obtaining a man, women have had ‘career’ aspirations and strategies which have relied heavily on the management of human relationships. Of course, this is by no means the only reason that women have been concerned with exploring, understanding and utilising relationship.... But let a woman writer concern herself with ‘relationships’, particularly relationships between the sexes, and she brands herself as the writer of that inferior class of novels – romantic fiction. Immediately her work is classified as outside the bounds of literary consideration.

The term ‘romantic fiction’ is used in much the same way to designate the printed word of women as ‘gossip’ is used to designate the spoken word of women. It is an all-encompassing (and derogatory) term which places women’s words beyond serious consideration. Neither ‘romantic fiction’ nor ‘gossip’ warrant analysis. Their inferior status is based not on an analysis but quite the reverse: such labels preclude analysis.....

There is no equivalent ‘catch-all’ for men’s writing, no male equivalent to romantic fiction (or gossip) which automatically renders certain concerns of men as beneath consideration....it is not that men do not gossip – or portray their sex in postures of gender-excess – but that when they do it, they call it by a different name: they call it something grander and more prestigious.

This double standard is not new. From the advent of the first woman novelist we have a value system which automatically places women’s concerns, and the literature which reflects them, in a subordinate position and generally beneath notice. Women’s lives and experiences are held to be less important and less significant than men’s, and women’s literature which gives them expression can be excluded from the literary tradition by virtue of its association with women, and without regard to its literary merit. This practice persists to the present day where the genre ‘romantic fiction’ is held in considerable contempt, and as this genre has never been the subject of serious or systematic analysis within the literary tradition, the evaluation is not based on the writing.

In part at least, argues Spender, because women, as a consequence of lack of access to it otherwise, needed substance from the novel, it is during this early period of the novel in which women writers dominated, that

...the transition from the more sensational to the more moral and reflective novels [took place]. Under the influence of women readers and women writers, the novel began to assume the dimensions of a commentary on the human condition.

She stresses that these female writers were at the time so successful both in terms of popularity and criticism that it was the male writers who competed with them, rather than vice-versa. Their audience was by no means limited to females. They were not perceived as ‘women writing for women’ even though their concern and perspective was often that of women.

This, again, is scarcely surprising if the human condition, relationships between humans and between humans and the world in which they live, is presumed to be the purpose of literature. The process of the removal of women from the literary canon no matter how they were perceived by their contemporary audience—a process by no means limited to these first women writers—is all the more fascinating to consider. In short what appears to be happening is that their subject matter is the ‘proper’ matter of literature and yet it is seen as something different when women write of it. They are writing of one thing and yet by virtue of nothing more than their gender—a point with which it is difficult to disagree when one reads Spender’s analysis— it becomes something else.

[Pink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love love love. This should be the backbone of any English lit syllabus and is a great resource for anyone looking to expand their reading of female authored classics. I learned so much about the specific authors mentioned, as well as the practice of women writing in the 17th and 18th century and how they went from being dominant writers of fiction, to undermined and maligned figures over the next 100 years. I'd probably heard of less than 10 of the women mentioned and there were over 100 names to discover, with full bibliographies. I borrowed this from my library, but it's such a fantastic book that I soon bought myself a second hand copy for my bookshelf. I suspect it will provide me with years of reading. Much recommended.

[Jessica Healy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't even begin to talk about how incredibly important I find this book. Why is it so difficult to get, when Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel is still widely available? This seems to me illustrative of how relevant this book is, how necessary the things it says, and how important for anyone interested in feminism/literary history to absorb it.

Plus, every time I go back to it, I find myself thinking - Margaret Cavendish, what a badass! I feel like we need to reclaim her as a literary heroine. I'd love to see her popping up in steampunky detective stories, of the kind Mary Shelley keeps finding her way into.

[Amaranta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro está compuesto por diferentes apartados, pero una de las mejores cosas que me dejó fue la literal lista de 100 novelistas del siglo XVII y XVIII (de hecho fueron más de 105 autoras) y de algunas ni siquiera se sabe su fecha de nacimiento, pero se sabe que publicaron novelas y fueron increíbles. Es bien triste como se ignoran a todas esas mujeres que casi en todos los casos fueron las que inspiraron a los vatos que sí leemos y conocemos.

[Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're into 18th century English women authors, then this is the book for you. An in-depth look at over 100 women novelists who had been largely forgotten, until now.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mothers of the Novel was published in 1987 with a specific polemical purpose, to re-establish the crucial role women played in the novel’s early life. What was originally supposed to be a chapter on the few progenitors to Jane Austen opened the door to whole generations of women who deserve to be better known and appreciated in the literary canon.

This strength of purpose gives the book vigour and bite but it also can make the book a little repetitive. It’s an important point to repeat, and I wouldn’t want the book to be lighter or more diplomatic, but it can get a little wearing. Writer after writer is brought up, discussed and analysed but each chapter ends with the same point, that the writer is not better known or respected because she was a woman. Some women were to scandalous to survive in the canon but some too demure, some women wrote too fast and others too slow, some wrote books that followed trends and some were too experimental, some were too political and some too domestic - whatever reason given, it boils down to the fact the writer was a woman.

This alone would have made this a powerful book but what makes it enjoyable, thrilling even, is the desire to introduce the reader to new writers and new works. It’s like being cornered by a friend who’s just got into something and wants to share it with you. The enthusiasm and glee to share all these new works and writers is what gives the joy to balance the anger.

I don’t know how much impact the book at series had when it came out, I was only two and my favourite books were Ladybird fairy stories (The Magic Porridge Pot was a banger) but I hope it made a splash. Certainly, in 2025, there has been some shift. Authors who were still a little remembered, like Aphra Behn and Fanny Burney are more central to the general, popular story of the novel. Fanny Burney even featured in a mid 2010s documentary about the birth of the novel, though she was described as the progenitor of ‘chick-lit’ and example of all women’s writing being forced into the same genre. I know that Eliza Haywood is getting much more love (as she deserves) with some of her works being figured in early novel courses… there’s some shift, but not much.

One of my overriding interests are books written in the eighteenth century (and I’m prepared to stretch into the long century when the occasion requires) and I had heard of many of the writers and read a chunk of them, but there were still authors I’d never heard of, books I’ve not tracked down. I want to find some writing by Anne Fanshawe now, I’m doubling my efforts to find Fielding and Collier’s The Cry, I’m looking forward to reading my Amelia Opie and my Eliza Fenwick. Even to an old hand like me, this book has opened up new roads to explore.

I didn’t realise Aphra Behn wrote 13 novels, I’ve only read two of them. I knew that Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is supposed to be good but I never realised how forthright and interesting she was. I had always assumed Delreviere Manley’s New Atlantis was a simple compendium of gossip but I didn’t know she worked with Swift, that they wrote journalism and satire together. Hearing about one character in that book, a gossipy midwife called Mrs Nightwork, I can’t help but draw links with Christopher Smart’s Mary Midnight - and I look forward to reading it to see if he may have got inspiration from there.

There were so many women writers towards the end of the eighteenth century, and they were so successful, that male writers began to publish under female pen names. A newer crop of women writers in the second half of the twentieth century may have felt they were carving out something new, with women’s literary journals and prizes - but they were only recreating a network that women writers had before. Jane Austen didn’t write in a vacuum, she was part of a full literary tradition. Even thirty-odd years after this book was published, I think that tradition is largely unknown and unsung.

Spender is quite contemptous of the two main histories of the novel, Ian Watts’s The Rise of the Novel (still in print) and Walter Allen’s The English Novel - both of which I’ve got but not read yet (I want to as a soon as I find the boxes they are in though). She gives Watts a little more credit for adding some women novelists in his telling, but as supporting parts to the five big men. Allen, according to Spender’s account, doesn’t even seem to realise that women might have had something to say through history.

I don’t agree with everything Spender argues. I’m not convinced that Anne Radcliffe should be heralded as the founder of the Romantic Movement, though I have to admit ignorance about the Romantics in general. I’m also not convinced that the erasure of women should be seen as an active attack by men, that it’s more a byproduct of men getting the last word every time and not even considering women. I don’t think Walter Allen left women out of his history because of an animus to women as much as his having a huge blind spot. I hope this book has reduced a blind spot of my own, even as a try to make women and male writings even throughout a year, I do read more men. It also challenged me to think about the book I’m writing and introduced a new chapter where one of the female characters gets to have her own say in a way I hadn’t thought of before.

I’ve read other books about women novelists of the same period but this one had a clarity and strength of argument that made it feel pretty vital. I think anyone looking into books of the period should read this - and it’ll prompt them to want to read a whole range of new stuff in the future.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite thing about this book is its overall content. Spender lists over 100 good women authors before Jane Austin. It took me over a year to read because I would pause to read some of the authors mentioned. If you even have the littlest curiosity about the history of western literature and the development of the novel, you should read this book. Sadly because of the misogynistic bent of our society the book may seem like a broken record. Dale Spender tells the story again and again and again of women who wrote great books and sold well only to be then treated horribly because they are women. The many amazing women of now (Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton to name two) will no doubt hear these words and shake their heads, from a book written in 1714 "Rivella", by Delarivière Manley "....what is not a crime in men is scandalous and unpardonable in women as she herself has very well observed in diverse places, throughout her own writings" (pp 78 in Mother). I cannot emphasize how this book needs to be read by so many.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, informative, amusing, and a little distressing. I now have a list of authors whose works I must get to...Note to self: Refer back to this book one of these days, when I have more free time and feel like reading older writing.

The book did get a little repetitive; the following sequence is repeated a few too many times: "And so she disappeared from history. But if it wasn't the quality of her writing which precipitated this, nor her fame during her lifetime, then what was it? What detail makes her different from [male contemporary of hers]? Surely not her sex...Yes, it was because she was a woman." But I guess it bears repeating.

Besides that, I think this book would have been better served had there been an epilogue or afterword which wrapped everything together.

Otherwise, it was fantastic. Spender is an excellent scholar and writer.

[Lorena Living Life · Rating 5 out of 5]

So informative and so mich ideology. Loved it

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole, a very useful and important book. At times I was troubled by the amount of speculation included, and by the broad generalizations Spender occasionally draws. However, if read with a grain of salt, this book details with great enthusiasm and passion the important work of canon revision that rests upon contemporary scholars.

[Nathalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this many years ago: and used it as ammunition when I took on my teachers at college. The curriculum was changed, but probably not for good.