Forgotten and overlooked female writers from the late 19th and early 20th century have been recognised in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford DNB) thanks to the work of the University’s International Centre for Victorian Women Writers.
Of the 11 new Victorian women authors featured in the publication, six have been covered by the Centre’s staff and PhD students. Four of these authors have connections to Kent, demonstrating the county’s rich and diverse literary heritage, as well as the influence of its successful Victorian seaside resorts upon popular culture of the time.
One of the authors to be recognised is Gabrielle Wodnil, whose book, Maggie of Margate: a seaside sensation, would have been characterised at the time as ‘women’s fiction’, but offers so much more, as Professor Carolyn Oulton, Director of the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers explains.
“Gabrielle Wodnil is very bright and intelligent and offers us something different and interesting. She is not trying to be a George Eliot, or a female Charles Dickens, as she is writing for the easy seaside, beach novel market that was very popular at the time. But she is also parodying the genre and making fun of that style of writing and laughing with the reader. She is writing in a very self-conscious way, for intelligent people looking to relax, not people who are too stupid to realise the difference. This style is unique and often overlooked, which is why I find it so interesting and why I love her writing, and what it stands for.”
Many authors writing towards the end of the Victorian period found recognition difficult to attain as they crossed the bridge between the Victorian and Edwardian eras. They weren’t seen as traditional Victorian writers, so were not acknowledged within that literary heritage, and were considered too conservative or old fashioned for the modernist writers of the 20th century.
“The late Victorian authors seemed to have put themselves into cold storage, as many writers were ignored, and remain so, because they simply cannot fit into a literary ‘box’, onto a publisher’s list or are seen to be writing in the ‘wrong genre’, continued Professor Oulton.
“These are the forgotten writers. A group of people that don’t fit neatly into literary description and so have disappeared.
“There were also many traps you could fall into as a woman writer from that time. There was so many women writing in the late Victorian period - the complaint at the time was that because there were so many of them they had to be trashy; flooding the market with cheap nonsense. The other side was that they were deemed too feminist and political for their books to be considered as worthy literature.
“However, as we can see through the work of Gabrielle Wodnil, and many authors of the time, their work was anything but trashy. Our work at the Centre has brought many of these amazing writers back to the foreground of our literary heritage where they deserve to be, ensuring their works are available to new audiences.
“The wonderful thing about biographies, is that we are looking at the life of an author, rather than trying to place them in a particular period and restricting them to a genre. The eleven women authors included in the new Oxford DNB show something of the richness of this untapped resource. The majority of them were prolific, whether driven by ambition, curiosity or just financial necessity. They incorporated crime into books of religious exhortation, learned Icelandic and studied Egyptology, penned detective stories and campaigned against vivisection and like their male counterparts, participated in the discourse of Empire. These authors remind us of our history - not least that it is often uncomfortable and never simple.”
In writing the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article for Bessie Marchant, I aimed to demonstrate the importance of continuing to unearth and recognise women writers' contributions to literature, especially in genres largely unattributed to them. By recovering writers like Marchant, the myriad ways in which women writers have, and continue to, challenge and subvert gender expectations are rendered visible. It is vital that we continue to study, write about, and promote the literature of marginalised women writers, or else we risk the continuation of their erasure from our literary heritage.
Laura Allen, former ICVWW PhD student and contributor to the Oxford DNB
The International Centre for Victorian Women Writers will be hosting a postgraduate study day on Wednesday, 3 May 2023 exploring working with archives and special collections. For more information visit the events webpage.
Discover more about Kent’s rich literary heritage visit Kent Maps Online, with interactive maps showing how the county has inspired writers and artists for generations.
Notes to editors
- The Oxford DNB is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history, worldwide, from prehistory to the year 2019.
- Of the authors included in the Oxford DNB:
- Gabrielle Wodnil and Jean Middlemass are written by professor Carolyn Oulton
- Bessie Marchant is written by Laura Allen whils a ICVWW PhD student
- Florence and Gertrude Warden and Maxwell Gray is written by Michelle Crowther, Faculty Research Librarian, Co-Lead of Kent Maps Online and ICVWW PhD student.