My [Dinner] Lunch with [Andre] Elizabeth

A Woman Attempts the Pen: The Feminist thought in Anne Finch’s The Introduction, 2021

On the limitless grounds of creation, settled a settler of a mysterious kind that judged this land to be under his control. The settler is an eagle with an enormous wing. Colonizing the land of creation, and any attempt to interpret or exercise the act of creation was a vicious sin. Authority had been engendered in the land of creation. This story was very much similar to one told by a woman who was once a countess. Anne Finch was a solitary female voice in the Augustan age, which saw a dearth of acknowledged female poets and writers; who in her Avant-grade poem “The Introduction” critiques the literary and social conventions of the age which depreciated the works of women and relegated them to the domestic role of housewives. Lady Winchelsea had attempted, in a land dominated by male authorities, to look at what her male contemporaries criticized other women writers for. This paper analyzes The Introduction to her Miscellany Poems and looks at what feminist critics had to say about the position of women in fiction. We’re mainly using Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic; in order to give an honest view about Lady Winchelsea and what it is to be a female outcast in a vast land dominated by men.

Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2020

for their efficiency in helping me track down numerous items referenced in this bibliography. I am also thankful to Elizabeth Spencer for giving me access to her personal collections and unpublished writings. *

Bishop–Lowell Studies

2015

My first historical novel-lames Miranda Barry (1999) was not born a Neo-Victorian novel, but became one. And it had a very personal link to my own life. Barry was a nineteenth-century colonial doctor and medical reformer, who had a very successful and colourful career in remote parts of the Empire. He spent an important period of his life in Jamaica, then a British colony, during the 1830s, taking care of the army garrison stationed on the island to protect the interests of the Crown and put down the numerous slave revolts. The British maintained a regiment there until the island's independence on 6 August 1962. I come from Jamaica: my father was Jamaican and my mother is English. Our house in the Blue Mountains near Greenwich, where the army barracks was situated, had been built by my father on the foundations of the old colonial barracks constructed by Dr James Barry to acclimatize the troops, so that they did not all die from yellow fever upon their arrival on the island. But 1 didn 't know that when I began my work on Barry. What interested me was the rumour that leaked out when Barry died in the early 1870s, that he was in fact, a woman. But was he? No one knows what sex Barry actually was. His recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, argues that he was a hermaphrodite.' We would now perhaps describe him as a transgender individual, but we cannot ever know for certain. Whatever he was, he certainly gave a command performance. So my theme was the dramatic interrogation of gender and identity. I decided to create a character that was neither man nor woman, but drew on both roles, sometimes of necessity and sometimes for his own pleasure. I wanted to create someone who was isolated, secretive, trapped inside his own head, and yet absolutely at liberty to be whoever he chose to be. The impulse behind this re-imagining of Dr James Miranda Barry came from my own unease at the roles being offered to me as a woman. This dilemma will be easily recognizable to all rational, intellectual women of my generation. And the parameters of this dilemma are these: what if you think that conventional femininity is equivalent to being crippled at birth? Or being lobotomized? What if you don't want to be a mother? What if you don't want a family or ever to live in one? And what-wait for it, gentlemen,-what if you loathe men, and the way the majority of men behave towards women, but would rather be a man than a woman if you had the choice? And what if you have no easy answers to the existential questions: what is a man? What is a woman? If any of the above questions seem to you to be irrelevant or highly problematic then either you are not a woman, or, because you didn't like the look of the deal, you have chosen not to be one. This dilemma is one that George Eliot would have recognized. That question-what does it mean to be a woman?-informs her fiction. How did Barry manage to be what Kate Bornstein, an imaginative transsexual, describes as both a gender-defender and a gender-transgressor?' He became famous and successful, he got his own way and he got away with it. He enjoyed the rich privileges of being a man, meaningful work and independence, but maintained his critical distance from the society in which he lived and worked. I needed to imagine cross-gendered characters, who enjoyed the roles proposed to them as well as the ones they invented for themselves. Where was such a model to be found? Shakespeare's heroines!

2015

George Eliot's afterlife in adaptations of and sequels to her works is thin compared to those of such contemporaries as Dickens and the Brontes, and similarly the number of novels in which she appears as a character is meagre. True, as early as 1881 the characterization of Theresa in The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford was inspired by the friendship of its author, William Hale White, with Marian Evans in the 1850s, when both lived in publisher John Chapman's house at 142 Strand. Theresa is an idealized character, but recall White's corrective to George Eliot's Life ... by her husband 1. W Cross, in which he laments the absence of salt and spice in the Marian Evans that Cross is carefully recreating. Patricia Duncker, offering George Eliot as the Sibyl in Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance, the latest novel to depict her, goes rather for salt and vinegar. Between White and Duncker there has been a smattering of fictional representations of George Eliot. Some, like J. E. Buckrose's Silhouette of Mary Ann (1931) and Elfrida Vipont's Towards a High Attic: The Early Life ofGeorge Eliot (1970), concentrate on the young Marian Evans, up to the point at which she enters into the relationship with Lewes and becomes George Eliot and a published author. Others focus on the relationship with John Cross, which is more susceptible to psychologizing and less to anxious moralizing than that with Lewes. In lohnnie Cross (1983), Terence de Vere White presents an infantilized Cross, overwhelmed by his bride's sexual demands. In one of the episodes of The Puttermesser Papers (1997), Cynthia Ozick allows her heroine Ruth Puttermesser a romance with a painter, a copyist, in which she channels George Eliot and he Cross: the copyist insists that the key emotional dynamic was Cross's infatuation with Lewes, triangulated through George Eliot. Deborah Weisgall in The World Before Her (2008) makes Cross a staid but devoted businessman, and George Eliot more wily and less dependent than in most accounts, fictional or otherwise. Most recently, Robert Muscutt in Heathen and Outcast: Scenes in the Life of George Eliot (2011) employs the novelist's disciple Edith Simcox as presiding narrator, calling on other voices to show a feisty Mary Ann, making central her relationship with brother Isaac (here relentlessly rigid, domineering, vindictive and materialistic). Engagingly, Duncker tells us that her starting point for the novel was the coincidence of her family name with that of one of George Eliot's German publishers, Duncker VerJag of Berlin. This house published the first German translation of Adam Bede, and was successful in the negotiation that underpins the action of Sophie and the Sibyl, about rights to the German translation of Middlemarch. (Although mention is made in the novel of Duncker Verlag's interest in both Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such, the firm secured neither.) The novel has a factual basis without pretence to literal historical accuracy. The action begins in Germany during the serialization of Middlemarch in 1871, continuing through to George Eliot's death and funeral in December 1880. Here we have imagined action consistent with documented events. In fact, the trips to Germany on which Duncker principally draws were to Berlin in 1870, when George Eliot and George Lewes were much feted, by the American ambassador among others, rolled in with visits to Homburg and Stuttgart in 1872. Duncker plays fair. The three epigraphs to Sophie and the Sibyl, two actual quotations and one from the fictional present day narrator, signal the morphing of fact into fiction. There are plenty 76

The International Conference on Narrative. The International Society for the Study of Narrative. University of Amsterdam, 16-18 June 2016., 2016

Even though recent criticism has began to include early women writers such as Eliza Haywood in the history of the novel, these writings pose some problems within the current understanding of the genre. Since Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel published in 1957, the novel has been definedas prose fiction that reflects the values, needs, and epistemological basis of the middle classes.From this perspective, many early women novelists remain marginal because the representation of the human being in their work does not correspond to the particular individual of the novel genre when it is defined as prose fiction that is based on social realism. The individual and gender roles in these writings belong to the aristocratic culture and the epistemology this culture relies on. Love and sexuality has a central place in these writings but they differ from the treatment of sexuality in the realist novel. To illustrate this point, I will discuss the representations of the individual and gender roles in Eliza Haywood's 1744 novel The Fortunate Foundlings. To discuss the representation of sexuality, I will draw on Nancy Armstrong's argument that the production of the feminine ideal is the main project of the realist novel in the eighteenth century. I will argue that the feminine ideal in The Fortunate Foundlingsis part of a worldview of an unquestionable, eternal order where the individual's position and value is determined by its birth in opposition to the feminine ideal in the realist novel,which gains its value in psychological terms and achieves development by experience.

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830, 2017

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels-in this case, Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox's Sophia (1762)-are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term "heroine," and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenthcentury female identity.

The plot of Sense and Sensibility is a conventional one for its time. It raises a conflict in love that is typical of the comedy of manners, and it resolves the anxieties of its heroines in a pleasing, if unremarkable, way. It is clear from the outset that the novel will focus on the education of Marianne's sensibility. She must learn through suffering that the decorum of polite society, which she despises, has been designed to channel and discipline human feeling. To Marianne, this decorum seems cold. She rejects it in the figure of Colonel Brandon, although she eventually learns that his own sobriety is largely the result of his earlier disappointment in love. Elinor is the key to Marianne's reformation, for she shows that to behave with decorum is not tantamount to behaving in a cold and unimaginative manner. She feels things as strongly as Marianne does, but Elinor realizes that simply giving vent to feeling destroys sense. In other words, the emotions and the intellect must be kept in exquisite balance. Thus, Sense and Sensibility is a comedy of manners not merely because it contains many amusing scenes but also because it is centered on a plot that resolves itself through an understanding of societal manners and how they have been developed to ensure a happy ending for human lives.

2012