Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

"It is as natural for a character in a [Margaret] Drabble novel to gossip about nineteenth-century heroines as to discuss her own childhood; in fact, more so. Heroines rather reticent about their own sexuality will decided that "Emma got what she deserved in marrying Mr. Knightley. What can it have been like, in bed with Mr. Knightley?""

On Woolf: "...in wishing to make women independent of all that dailiness and bitterness, so that they might "escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality," she was advocating a strategic retreat, and not a victory; a denial of feeling, and not a mastery of it."

"I think it is important to demystify the legend of Virginia Woolf. To borrow her own murderous imagery, a woman writer must kill the Angel in the House, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom. For Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, the Angel was Jane Austen. For the feminist novelists, it was George Eliot. For mid-twentieth-century novelists, the Angel is Woolf herself."

"The stream-of-consciousness technique (a term, incidentally, that Richardson deplored, and parodied as the "Shroud of Consciousness") was an effort to transcend the dilemma by presenting the multiplicity and variety of associations held simultaneously in the female mode of perception."

"[Dorothy] Richardson maintained that men and women used two different languages, or rather, the same language with different meanings. As might and Englishman and an American, "by every word they use men and women mean different things." "

"Most suffragettes, however, could not imagine that sexual revolution would take the form of female license rather than male chastity." - so they'd be really surprised to see what happened in the rest of the 1900s.

"Like most of the women writers, Violet Hunt was less than eager to participate in the large protest marches that led to jail terms, hunger strikes, and the horrors of forcible feeding. She was excused by the Pankhursts on the grounds that she had to support an invalid mother, that staple furniture of the woman writer's home..."

"The Women Writers Suffrage League was the brainchild of two young journalists, Cecily Hamilton and Bessie Hatton...with the object of obtaining "the Parliamentary Franchise for women on the same terms as it is, or may be, granted to men." " - There was also an actress' league "to make up and disguise the WSPU leadership in their hideouts from the police."

Josephine Butler: "At the very base of the Acts lies the false and poisonous idea that women have 'nothing to do with this question,' and ought not to hear of it, much less meddle with it. ...I cannot forget the misery, the injustice and the outrage fallen upon women simply because we stood aside, when men felt our presence to be painful." [Having an Interior Cheering Section for this.]

So far all the biographies I can find on Josephine Butler are paper books. I only wish for ebooks for immediate gratification, but I suppose I'll go to the 1800s era texts online. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephin...

Also footnotes alerted me to the Contagious Disease Acts and feminist reaction - which was basically 'why aren't men examined too? Why focus on prostitutes only?' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagio... Now adding more books to my list...

I am really enjoying these footnotes: #6, citing examples of Darwinism applied to feminist writings; Frances Swiney, The Cosmic Procession (1906): "Miss Swiney argues that "man, on a lower plane, is undeveloped woman."" Because that's very likely a book I'm not apt to easily bump into.

Ok, you're not going to believe this one. 1888, a doctor warned that reading sensationalist novels could "accelerate the occurrence of menstruation." [facepalm]

"Like the domestic novelists of the previous generation, the sensationalists encouraged a special relationship, a kind of covert solidarity, between themselves and their readers. The audience for the sensation novel was, or was widely assumed to be, female, middle-class, and leisured."

"Florence Marryat wrote her first novel, Love's Conflict (1865), "in the intervals of nursing" her eight children, all stricken with scarlet fever."

"In the 1840s the success of women novelists had been perceived as a female invasion; in the 1860s women writers' advances were often perceived as a female monopoly."

"The influence of Jane Eyre was international; within a year of its publication, an American critic wrote with mock terror about the "Jane Eyre fever" reaching epidemic proportions - young men caught it and began to swagger and swear in the Rochester style."

"Like her sisters Anne and Emily, Charlotte [Bronte] might have shown men drunken and violent. But it did not pay, as she learned from Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for ladies to show how much they knew about men's lives."

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote George Eliot to describe a two hour conversation she (Stowe) had in a seance with Charlotte Bronte. Footnote info: via The George Eliot Letters V (and cite hooha), then author's note: "Eliot was skeptical." Now making note to read those letters.

"The Brontes, in their radical innocence, confronted all sexually biased criticism head on. Charlotte constantly had to be restrained by her publishers from attacking critics in the prefaces to her books, and she frequently wrote directly to reviewers and journals in protest." - and suddenly we all love Charlotte more, right?! Note that here any protest at all is radical for a woman.

After liking the book Adam Bede when he thought the author was a man, William Hepworth Dixon went on to make catty remarks once George Eliot was out'd as female. He was also known for reviewing his OWN BOOKS favorably under a pseudonym. So yeah, sockpuppetry self-praise, it's historical. And still just as worthy of mocking.

Somewhere in one of the many shelves here I have a book on Hildegard von Bingen. I need the ability to run a search query in real life rooms. Preferably on an interface that hovers in the air, with a touch screen.

Particularly hard to read that Charlotte Bronte got such grief from critics because her writing in Jane Eyre was 'un-feminine.' Because her characters felt passion and she wrote her men too realistically (cursing, forceful words = unwomanly writing). Add to list of reasons you don't want to travel back in time to their generation.

Having too much fun with the Books You Disliked That Everyone Else Seems To Love - because at the same time I completely agree most of them are great books, well written, worth reading. It's just that I don't much like the characters or the worlds, or want to revisit them. Some of them I probably would have read to see what the fuss was about, if they'd not been assigned reading.

I was gleefully adding all of Neil De Grasse Tyson's ebooks to my "email and notify me of price drop" thing when it hit me - if this man puts them all on sale at the same time I am doomed. Oh well. At least I'm saving shelf space!

1862, Gerald Massey: "Women who are happy in all home-ties and who amply fill the sphere of their love and life, must, in the nature of things, very seldom become writers."

"Since the Victorians had defined women as angelic beings who could not feel passion, anger, ambition, or honor, they did not believe that women could express more than half of life."

"Victorian physicians and anthropologists supported these ancient prejudices by arguing that women's inferiority could be demonstrated in almost every analysis of the brain and its functions. They maintained that, like the "lower races," women had smaller and less efficient brains, less complex nervous development, and more susceptibility to certain diseases, than did men."

"As late as 1851, there were a few hardy souls who continued to deny that women could write novels." - saying it took the "properly masculine power of writing books" - ah, the 1800s, such fun.

Note to self, add list of women authors that I've discovered or been reminded of, whose books are available online.