(S) Woman Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature

For most of history the virtues women ought to follow centred around silence, obedience and chastity, meaning that women who wrote and published demonstrated by implication, as Anna Beer argues, unprecedented levels of disobedience and unchastity (2024: 72). Hence, it comes as no surprise that women who write have not only been labelled mad, undisciplined and dangerous but have also been nearly absent from the literary history of Britain. While this seminar will not offer a comprehensive history of British female authors, it will provide a closer look at female contemporaries of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton and trace the challenges women faced in writing and publishing their work from the fourteenth century onwards. Delving into the lives and works of five writers – Margery Kempe, Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen – and through a close-reading of selected texts, we will trace in how far (or if at all) their works challenge gendered beliefs which have underpinned social institutions. We will also explore the construction of female authors throughout literary history, from their demonization to the continuous questioning of their mental state, and how 'writing back' has sought to deconstruct these notions (and has simultaneously helped to uphold them).