Women in Lit critics and context

Gilbert and Gubar (ending message)

‘Sense and Sensibility ends with the overt message that young women […] must submit to the powerful conventions of society by finding a male protecter’

Gilbert and Gubar (Lucy and Mrs. Ferrars)

‘Mrs. Ferrars and her scheming protegee Lucy Steele prove that women themselves become agents of repression, manipulators of conventions and survivors’

J. Simons (ambiguity)

‘How far is Clarissa a sympathetic portrait and how far an ironic subject? This ambivalence becomes a hallmark of her portrayal’

Hallahan (importance of the party)

‘In Woolf’s party, we see the curious meeting of life and death, where death holds the ability to give life order and meaning’

John Mullen (why they marry)

‘Conduct books of the period tend to represent marriage as a solemn religious duty but in Austen’s novels the harsh economic reality of a young woman’s value in the marriage market is what preoccupies most of the characters’

2020 review

‘The heroic couples of the tale seeing little actual page time which limits even the angst of unrequited love’

Lady Bessborough

‘Though it ends stupidly, I was very much amused by it’

Charlotte Bronte

‘Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant not sagacious and profound’

David Lodge (marxism in Sense and Sensibility)

‘The pretence that bourgeois culture is normal’

Sir Walter Scott (Austen’s skills)

‘The exquisite touch which renders common place things and characters interesting’

Andrew Wright (the switch)

‘The grand irony is that Elinor and Marianne virtually interchange positions’

Toby Tanner (Woolf Vs. Austen)

‘Virginia Woolf’s characters put up screens to preserve the self; Elinor paints and makes screens to preserve society’

Toby Tanner (Sense and Sensibility)

‘A book about to what extent nature has to be reshaped and pruned to make society possible’

Gilbert and Gubar (Austen’s escape)

‘Authorship for Austen is an escape from the very restraints she imposes on her female characters’

The Communist Mainfesto

‘The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production’

David Bradshaw (London)

‘Woolf also recognised that London’s cityscape embodied the patriarchal repression of women’

Elaine Showalter (Time)

‘The insistent chiming of clocks keeps us aware of the passage of time and the measuring out of human lives’

Gary Grey (Woolf’s attempt)

‘Mrs. Dalloway […] was an attempt to reveal the mystery and magic of personality beneath the skin of human beings’

John Batchelor (gender opposition)

‘Mrs. Dalloway uses the idea of public and private life as a means of exploring the then opposition between the masculine view of the world (that of doing) and the feminine view (that of feeling)’

Arnold Bennett (the woman herself)

'Mrs. Woolf told us ten thousand things about Mrs. Dalloway but did not show us Mrs. Dalloway'

Leigh Kincer (Clarissa’s issue)

‘Clarissa is a slave to society's rules of behaviour which ultimately cut her off from any substantial relationship'

Leigh Kincer (Septimus’ judgement)

'Septimus fully grasps the extent of the damage society has done to him and judges the world accordingly’

Woolf on Aphra Behn

'All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds'

What did Thomas Gisborne describe novels as?

In ‘An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex’ he described them as ‘secretly corrupt’

What did Horace Walpole call Mary Wollstonecraft?

‘A hyena in petticoats’

In ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ what did Mary Wollstonecraft call women marrying for financial support?

A form of prostitution

What did Mary Shelley call Frankenstein?

‘My hideous progeny’

What was Mary Shelley often asked about Frankenstein?

‘How I, then a young girl, come to dilate upon so very hideous a subject’

When was the married woman’s property act?

1882

When did women over 30 and who owned property earn the right to vote in the U.K.?

1918

When did women earn the right to vote on the same terms as men?

1928

What did Woolf say was more important than a woman’s right to vote?

Financial independence and security