The Art of Writing a Book

Until I got to graduate school, I seldom had trouble finding a writing topic or carving out a workable thesis. But in graduate school, the stakes were different: A major scholarly undertaking had a potential audience that was much larger and much more knowledgeable than I was accustomed to, and the fear of not having something sufficiently important to say to such an audience paralyzed me. In particular, I was terrified by the prospect of having to choose a dissertation topic.

 But as I prepared for my oral qualifying exams in 18th- and 19th-century British literature and in the history and theory of criticism, I suddenly realized there was a gap. Feminist scholars in the 1960s and the 1970s had brought to light many women writers who wrote fiction, poetry, drama and personal essays, and those “recovered” writers were well represented on my reading list. But the criticism reading list included very few women writers, and the earliest was Virginia Woolf.

 “Surely Woolf wasn’t the first woman to write literary criticism,” I mused. So where were those earlier women critics? Why weren’t their names and works represented?

 Answering those two simple questions about the missing women critics not only resolved my dissertation topic crisis, but it has generated many years of subsequent scholarly work. I’ve edited an anthology of Victorian women’s literary criticism (published by Broadview Press in 2003) and my current book project, tentatively entitled “Critical Women” examines the lives and work of a number of women who were active as social and aesthetic critics during the 19th century.

Uncovering those lost women critics has taken me on a fascinating search below the surface of literary history, through dusty manuscript collections, teeming with publishers’ archives, and libraries great and small. I’ve since discovered the wisdom of minding the gap.

_ Solveig Robinson, PhD, Department of English.