Women Write in English: Subversion, Story, and Selfhood, ca. 1400-2023
By Elissa Johnston
English literature has been a place for women writers for a long time. People have been writing in English for about a thousand years. During the early centuries of writing in English (ca. 1000-1600), most women were kept from reading and writing by misogynistic narratives about the female mind and body that structured ideas about humanity from antiquity through the medieval period and beyond. And yet English was also the language of female readers and writers in medieval England; women usually didn’t learn Latin (the dominant language of ecclesiastical and textual authority). And when we start to see women writing in late medieval England (like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe), they write in English.
In short, English has a long history of being a language in which women found ways to get their voices from their bodies into books, to shape and subvert cultural discourses with their writerly voices. This Women’s History Month, we invite you to take a few minutes to explore some of the texts that female writers have used to write themselves into (sometimes unfriendly) cultural narratives.
If you’ve ever wondered how weird—and simultaneously relatable—the medieval world could seem, you haven’t met Margery Kempe yet. Her autobiographical “book” is a pretty strange experience for the modern reader (if sophisticated theology is more your cup of tea, may I recommend Julian of Norwich). But Kempe’s book (written ca.1430) is indispensable for those interested in the history of women’s writing in English. Margery was an epic non-conformist; her violent episodes of screaming (she calls it “roaring”), crying, and hysterical laughter are as disruptive to our pictures of what womanhood could look like in fifteenth-century England as they were disruptive to the male religious establishment of her day. She’s hardly a feminist, but her voice informs much of the groundbreaking feminist work that medievalists have done in the last few decades. If you want to experience her in the language of her day, Lynn Staley’s TEAMS edition is accessible online.
It’s easy to love Jane Austen (if you’re into that sort of thing), but it’s also easy to stop at Pride and Prejudice (that BBC miniseries, anyone?). Yet one of Austen’s most intense and searching explorations of women’s status in Regency England comes not in Pride and Prejudice but in her last novel, Persuasion. Anne Elliot is older, more introspective, and more concerned with women’s place in society than Elizabeth Bennett, but her story is no less compelling. We see in this novel some of Austen’s most explicit pushback against men writing women’s narratives for them. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” Anne Elliot points out. As if in response, Persuasion puts Anne Elliot at the center of action and observation; she—not a male intermediary—tells her story to the reader.
Maxine Hong Kingston ruffled quite a few feathers with her 1976 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. It’s troubled and troubling—is it an autobiography, or is it a kind of mythologically-inflected fantasy? What do we make of its ghosts, its gripping horror sequences, its gut-wrenching navigation of female Chinese immigrant identity? Is it reverent or iconoclastic? And does Kingston’s project—forging the self from story—succeed? One thing’s certain, though: Kingston has a way with words, and her book is impossible to put down. It encourages us to take our names and stories seriously. The stories we tell ourselves (and about ourselves) matter. As Kingston puts it, “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true.”
Also initially published in 1976, Moments of Being is Virginia Woolf’s only published autobiographical writing. It contains five short pieces from her unpublished manuscripts, collected and edited by Jeanne Schulkind, all of which take us inside Woolf’s head in a particularly intimate way. In “A Sketch of the Past,” for example, Woolf questions the very project of autobiography (of memoir) she attempts. How much of life—of the self—can be written? And how much is forgotten, doomed to recede into the state of cotton-wool fuzziness she calls “non-being”? Woolf is creatively and unremittingly committed to writing the self (her self). She also wrestles openly with “why it is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen. The person is evidently immensely complicated.” Whether you’ve loved Woolf for a long time or are new to her writing, Moments of Being gives a stunning entry point to the mind of this brilliant and transformative author.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson asks provocatively in her clever, fierce, complicated autobiographical account of adoptive—and writerly—identity. Winterson connects story-telling and identity from the very first pages of her book. “The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story—of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing… That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.” Winterson unrelentingly writes her way into this void for the rest of the book, taking us on her journey of self-creation. This is a book for people who love books; Winterson uses stories and words to get at the root of the relationship between story and self. Her discoveries will stick with you.
Happy reading!
