Female Writers

In the 19th century, female writers were growing in numbers but were still not well known, and their works were not at the time widely read. Often female authors would publish their works anonymously, or under a false name, so that the public would be unaware that the writer had been a woman. Many of the novelists and poets that are today so well-known from that time period were barely acknowledged during their lifetime. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti are all examples of female poets and authors who are famous today but were barely known during their lives, simply because female artists were barely acknowledged during that time and before. Many of these women wrote in specific detail about the struggles that they and the women around them went through on a daily basis, as well as the issues that they saw with current society, and the differences between the still very specific male gender roles and the role of women in the nineteenth-century.

Many of the novels of the time were even autobiographies of sorts, hidden behind characters and some amount of plot embellishment. Perhaps because of this, many of the female characters, although they start out strong, often finish the novel in a gender role typical way. These characters, like Emma in Jane Austen’s famous novel of the same name, would often seem to be strong at the beginning of the novel, defying the norms of society and their gender roles, and then finish the novel in a much weaker way, often conforming to the roles that they had originally been portrayed defying. In Liora Brosh's article, Consuming Women, Austen's predilection for bringing awareness to gender roles through her writing is expanded upon. In Austen's and other female writers' defiance of creating her characters to defy gender roles, much of this could have been a statement about how the authors felt about their own lives.

Works Cited

Wolf, Abby. "19th Century Women Writers." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.

"Women Writers: 19th Century." About.com Women's History. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.

"Women Writers-19th Century." Women Writers-19th Century. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.