Abstract
This chapter is about the ‘spatial turn’ that occurs in literature of the nineteenth century, and the relationship it bears to women’s writing. By ‘spatial turn’, I mean a change of emphasis from texts in which location and environment tend to form a neutral backdrop to action to, in the nineteenth century, texts in which place increasingly plays a decisive role in structuring narratives, and is often a significant element in the thematic substance of the work. The turn is particularly marked in fiction, where the popular success of novels by Walter Scott made it de rigueur for writers to include topographical descriptions, dialect, and other markers of geographical location in their works. Novels came to be admired for their depiction of environments and places that felt somehow real: places which were not only convincingly portrayed, but which also an enthusiastic reader might visit as a tourist, and even inhabit. At the same time, new modalities of place emerged in literature, which provided the basis of a new taxonomy of place-based subgenres such as the regional novel, the provincial novel, or the village tale.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See my ‘Place, Region and Migration’, in Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 3 1820–1880, ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor and John Kucich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 361–77.
John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), vol. 18: 136.
On separate spheres, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes, Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987)
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. by Elizabeth Porges Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.1.
On the provincial novel, see Ian Duncan, ‘The Provincial or Regional Novel’, in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002), pp. 318–35
John Plotz, ‘Provincial Novel’ in A Companion to the English Novel, ed. by Stephen Arata et al. (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 360–73. Neither emphasises the role of gender. Cf. my ‘Rethinking Provincialism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Our Village to Villette’, Victorian Studies, 55.3 (Spring 2013), 399–424.
For a stimulating discussion of the intersections between these terms see Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), especially pp. 93–7.
Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 117–66.
Caroline Chisholm, The ABC of Emigration (London: John Ollivier, 1850).
‘A Bundle of Emigrants’ Letters’, in Household Words, 1 (30 March 1850): 19–24. See my ‘On Settling and Being Unsettled: Legitimacy and Settlement around 1850’, in Legitimacy and Illegitimacy: Law, Literature and History c. 1780–1914, ed. by Margot Finn, Michael Labon, and Jenny Bourne Taylor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 48–66.
Letter from Charles Dickens to Angela Burdett Coutts, 4 March 1850, in Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 6, ed. by Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 52–3, 53. 11. On the proliferations of subgenres of fiction in the nineteenth century, see Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998) pp. 33–40.
See Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015).
On steel-plate printing, see John O. Jordan, ‘Book Illustration’, in Oxford Encyclopaedia of British Literature, ed. by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 238.
Jill Rappoport holds that the introduction of annuals ‘changed the face of nineteenth-century publishing’; see Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. 19–44 (p. 19). Albums and gift books were also popular formats: like annuals, these were luxurious forms of multi-authored, illustrated books, but were single productions, rather than yearly publications in a series.
For Landon’s biography, see Glennis Byron, ‘Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1802–1838)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15978, accessed 12 Feb 2016]
Cf. Rappoport, Giving Women, who claims, against critical orthodoxy, that annuals ‘allow readers to address pressing civic affairs’ (p. 28).
According to Paula Feldman, about 75% of annuals were purchased by men for women. See Feldman, ‘Women, Literary Annuals, and the Evidence of Inscription’, in Keats—Shelley Journal, 55 (2006), 54–62; cited in Rappoport, Giving Women, p. 20.
20. In this, they were closely related to the Silver Fork, or the ‘fashionable’ novel, which presented stories about a similar metropolitan milieu and was also geared to a largely female readership. See Cheryl A. Wilson, Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012) pp. 79–93.
Philip Temple, A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), p. 106.
Clare Pettitt observes that the association between scrapbooks and annuals is noted in the title of Fisher’s. On scrapbooks as records of travel, see ‘Topos, Taxonomy and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Scrap Books’, in Travel Writing, Visual Culture and Form, 1760–1900, ed. by Mary Henes and Brian Murray (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 21–41.
On practices of scrapbooking in 1820s Britain and their cultural impact, see James Secord, ‘Scrapbook Science: Composite Caricatures in Late Georgian England’, in Figuring It Out: Science, Gender and Visual Culture, ed. by Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman (Dartmouth, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), pp. 164–91.
The practice of customising texts was well established among elite, male book collectors from the mid-eighteenth century onwards as ‘extra illustration’. On inscriptions in books, see Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p.129.
On Herrick’s popularity in the nineteenth century, see Rebecca N. Mitchell, ‘Robert Herrick, Victorian Poet: Christina Rossetti, George Meredith and the Victorian Recovery of Hesperides’, Modern Philology, 113, No. 1 (August 2015), pp. 88–115.
We might read this as a specifically feminised version of the sublime. Cf. Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), especially pp. 1–10: the feminine sublime is ‘the site both of women’s affective experiences and their encounters with the gendered mechanisms of power from the mid-eighteenth century to the present [...], for it responds specifically to the diverse cultural configurations of women’s oppression, passion, and resistance’ (p. 2).
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 123–4, citing Southey to G. D. Bedford, 8 December 1828, quoted in Lee Erikson, The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 30.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 267.
Cf. Talia Schaffer’s alternative account in Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chap. 2. Schaffer argues that Gaskell’s references to domestic handicrafts— which include paper crafts that use printed paper—are the measure of historical change.
See, for example, W. Kingdom, Dictionary of Quotations from the British Poets, 3 vols. (London: Whittaker, 1824), or the cheap, duodecimo Quotations from the British Poets (c. 1830), damaged copy in British Library. The preface boasts that it is ‘the best pennyworth of poetry now extant’.
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 66–83.
See also Jeffrey Cass, ‘“The Scraps, Patches, and Rags of Daily Life”: Gaskell’s Oriental Other and the Conservation of Cranford’, Papers on Language and Literature, 35.4 (1999), pp. 417–33.
On Gaskell’s vexed relationship with Dickens, see Hilary Schor, Scherezade in the Market Place: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 91–7, and Schaffer, Novel Craft, pp.74–5.
Schaffer, Novel Craft, p. 76. In fact, Schaffer elides the distinction between magazines and newspapers. My point is that with its sedate pace, life in Cranford resembles an annual, rather than the more frenetic weekly magazine or even daily newspaper.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McDonagh, J. (2018). Women Writers and the Provincial Novel. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58464-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58465-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)