Facing the Page: A Study of the Prefaces of Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers

       Today, many academics are urging us to revaluate women writers, to rethink the canon, and to recover lost authors.  This study moves away from theorizing about an "anxiety of authorship," assumes the taboos and obstacles for the "public" woman, and swerves from attempts to refigure the canon onto new ground: it articulates how women's authority was actually created in nineteenth-century England and what strategies women used rhetorically to locate themselves within the intellectual culture of which they were becoming a part.  Facing the Page, a study of the prefaces of nineteenth-century British women writers, examines the rhetorical strategies they used to achieve authority in the public sphere.  Whether in the field of literature, travel writing, conduct writing, or political commentary, women writers had to rely on precise linguistic signals in order to authorize their projects.
       While the preface has received attention in studies of Wordsworth, Hardy, Whitman, and James and has been scrutinized theoretically by Derrida and Spivak, the preface presents an as-yet underhistoricized and negligibly theorized social, intellectual, and rhetorical predicament for the woman writer.  Nineteenth-century women writers had to negotiate the social implications of being "public women" along with the intellectual anxieties of publishing.  Using variations of the feminine ideal, contemporary aesthetic terminology, and revised classical types of public discourse (forensic, deliberative, and epideictic), they were able to strategically carve a public space for themselves. This project categorizes five tendencies or moves, seen in the prefaces of fifteen women writers writing from different historical moments in the nineteenth century and on diverse subject matter in various genre forms.
       The first half of the dissertation, consisting of three chapters, examines three strategies where women writers deflect their authority or mask their presumptuousness in order to authorize their projects.  The second chapter, "Apologizing for Authority," examines how women writers apologize for their work, assuming the appropriate stance of humility and modesty, suggesting their publication was urged by others.  In other words they defend their project in a variation on forensic rhetoric by defending their femininity: their authority depends upon their ethos in multiple ways.  Travel writer Isabella Bird, historian and social activist Hannah More, and poet Eliza Cook illustrate this strategy.  In the third chapter, "Justification by Social Work," I discuss how women writers may position their project as good for the nation and therefore more as an act of social work than imagination, more sympathetic than Wordsworthian.  They exhort a future course of action in this classically deliberative form of public discourse but transform it in a nineteenth-century context.  Novelists Mary Hays and Elizabeth Gaskell along with conduct writer Sarah Stickney Ellis furnish examples of this strategy.  In the fourth chapter, "Get Real," women writers credit "reality" over their representation of it by positioning their project as real or mimetic, transparent and without any powerful hand controlling it.  By gesturing to the appropriate literary posture of the contemporary writer, the realist writer, Charlotte Yonge, Olive Shreiner, and the Bronte‘s avoid gendering themselves altogether.  They can authorize their project's purpose in the preface by situating it in the epideictic mode, a conventional form of public discourse that creates an argument through acts of praise or blame.  These women writers then use the social, aesthetic, and rhetorical tools at hand to create a means of entry into the public forum.
       The second half of the dissertation, a pair of two chapters, investigates more assertive examples of women's representation of authority where women writers overturn classical rhetorical models and explode conventional social and aesthetic codes.  The novelists Mary Shelley, George Eliot, and Sarah Grand challenge contemporary definitions of femininity socially and therefore resist conventional rhetorical moves in their prefaces.  This discussion makes up the fifth chapter, "Men, Monsters, and New Women."  The way in which women writers locate themselves in a female literary tradition concludes the project in the sixth chapter, "Women's Work."  Here I look at a wide array of women writers from across the century to see how this community slowly evolves.
       This project shows the various avenues women writers used to gain access to the same literary marketplace inhabited by their male counterparts.  Rather than ghettoizing the woman writer and her experience, I see her as attempting to gain the same ground and as critically engaged in the same central concerns as her male contemporaries.  These women writers consciously lay claim to the social, aesthetic, and rhetorical means available to them in order to contribute to the complicated cultural constructions of femininity, the Romantic ideology of the imagination, the Victorian genre of realism, and finally aesthetic and literary history.