In 1929, Virginia Woolf reflected that women writers of the previous century had faced a difficult task: breaking the “male sentence” and inventing a style better suited to female expression. The popularity of women’s writing in 19th-century Britain showed that, for the first time, women could achieve both commercial and artistic success with the pen—and their work has held enduring appeal for readers and scholars. How do these writers deal with gender, race, identity, social roles, and aesthetics? What would it mean to imagine a distinctively feminine style? As we seek answers to these and many other questions, we will explore critical approaches to women’s writing from feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and more.

Each essay assignment in this class will ask you to develop an original, critical viewpoint on a work of literature. We will devote plenty of class time to honing skills essential to college writing, such as close reading, critical thinking, revising your work, and building on other scholars’ ideas. As we grapple with complex works of literature in class discussions and essay workshops, we will work towards a richer understanding of women’s writing in the 19th century and beyond.