This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Those of a sensitive disposition, who might require trigger warnings, should perhaps avoid the work of Anne Bradstreet. Usually hailed as the first American poet, she is a colonist who arrived in Massachusetts with her husband from England in 1630, possibly reluctantly. Though touted by her publisher as a “gentlewoman”, her political poetry was far from gentle. 

It sits uneasily with the ideal of the woman writer — either in the 17th century, when women were supposed to be plying the needle not the pen, or in today’s era of intersectional feminism. It’s hard to swallow her robust take on Catholics (“Hang’em, hang’em, load Tyburn till it cracks”), her bloodthirsty call for a holy war against Muslims, or her indifference towards the indigenous population and to the slaves of African origin who were already beginning to be shipped to the Americas. 

Then there’s Aphra Behn, the rollicking Restoration playwright, whose commitment to MeToo looks a little wanting given that her sexy hero’s seduction strategies include attempted rape (nine of her plays include rape or attempted rape but the survivors get short shrift). That’s before you get into the more subtle ways in which intelligent female writers have seemingly accommodated patriarchy, whether through disingenuous claims to modesty or proffering marriage as a fairy-tale ending even when they know the socio-economic realities don’t always add up in real life for real women (see Jane Austen).

Anna Beer’s new book, Eve Bites Back, is subtitled “An Alternative History of English Literature”, but it’s actually a series of seven essays on a handful of disparate women writers from the mediaeval to Victorian periods, starting with the early mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and ending with Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the queen of 19th century “sensation” fiction. The best known of her case studies is Austen; the least is Shakespeare’s contemporary, poet Aemilia Lanyer. The latter’s question to men — “why should you disdain / Our being your equals?” — echoes throughout the book, all of whose subjects’ minds were touched, whether explicitly or implicitly, by Western culture’s dominant Judeo-Christian theodicy and the founding myth of Eve.

Critics have defined women writers more by their lives than their works

As a writer, Beer — whose previous work includes a study of women composers — has the rhetorical qualities of a marvellous essayist: a deceptively easy informal style, a rare capacity for précis and an ability to home in on and acknowledge the uncertainties and tensions, the nuances and contradictions, rather than reach for reductive generalisations. 

She raises, for example, the fact that women writers, unlike their male equivalents, have historically been more defined by their lives than by their works in the eyes of critics: that their “lived experience” has always been seen as the key — whether by misogynist men in the past keen to traduce them or by modern feminists wanting to recover them. It’s then disarming to find her explicitly admitting that she’s half-doing that herself. Her very admission paradoxically ends up giving her argument extra heft and sending us back to the literary works.

Her essay on Jane Austen — whose works are likely to be best known to general readers — is truly thought-provoking. She’s interested in the tension between Austen’s irony and her fairy-tale endings and at the same time roots her discussion in a bibliographical exploration of the relationship between private coterie writing and public print. The young Austen was relaxed enough to make her own jokes about anal sex in manuscripts for a limited circle but attributes the gag about “rears and vices” in the navy to the morally dubious Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. 

Indeed, throughout this book, Beer’s detailed awareness of publishing realities — from the circulation of vellum manuscripts through patronage to mass marketing of Victorian penny dreadfuls — is a real boon to her historicised readings of all her subjects. Her willingness to recognise that the past is sometimes another country — and yet to remain empathetically open to the specific experiences of women writing in each era — is laudable. 

Charlotte Brontë in reality was a hidebound Tory

Feminist critics used to tie themselves in knots and perpetrate historical solecisms because they wanted to put all women writers into a Whig version of history that promoted a simplistic idea of inevitable progress. Charlotte Brontë, for example, was assumed in the 1970s to be a liberal in politics because of the feminist elements in her novels, though in reality she was a hidebound Tory. The value of Beer’s entertaining and thought-provoking case studies lies in her preparedness to embrace the ideological — indeed personal and emotional — complexities of the past whilst still flying the flag for women writers as creative individuals whose genius was inevitably intertwined with the world they inhabited. Why, she asks with reason, should talented women writers of the past take on the heft of pre-empting today’s Utopian orthodoxies?

It is a pity that Beer’s publisher appears to have chosen to try to turn a series of interestingly idiosyncratic enquiring essays on individuals — valuable in themselves not least because they chafe against the need to generalise — into some sort of totalising history and bland manifesto. Readable histories of women’s literature are nothing new, viz Ellen Moers’s witty and incisive Literary Women (1976) or Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1978), whilst scholars have since unearthed Anglo-Saxon female writers that predate Julian and Margery. 

After fifty years of feminist literary scholarship, it seems almost depressing to think that readers still need to be introduced to the idea of the history of women’s writing. Perhaps it is necessary. However, Beer’s introduction and conclusion — no doubt written at her publisher’s behest — are less convincing than her in-depth portraits. It’s the freshness of her authorial voice, along with her appreciation of nuance and complexity in each case study, that make this book so enthralling.