What is Women's Lit?

This semester I'm teaching again for the first time in a long time. I love my job as a librarian, but I sometimes feel like I spend most of my time pointing researchers toward sources rather than  actually engaging with those sources. So, I picked up a women's literature class at a university not too far away, and I'm back in the classroom.

There are many ways that I could have designed this course, but my main goal was to keep it as fun as possible, both for me and for the students. I've been reading a lot of chick lit in the past few years, so I was imagining a class that takes a look at the origins of chick lit. Looked at from that perspective, the obvious starting point was Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Bronte's Jane Eyre--in other words, two classic love stories that a lot of contemporary women's literature is responding to and revising.

Once I had decided on my motif for the class--i.e., how women writers have been re-writing and re-thinking the ways in which P&P and JE set up the love story as defining women's opportunities--I had to decide which texts to spend the rest of the semester reading. There are so many possibilities that I finally decided to punt on the question by assigning the Norton Anthology of Women's Lit and giving myself some room on this first time through with the course to figure out exactly what it's about.

I'm pretty content with the shape of the course and its readings, which run from Sui Sin Far up to Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri. The Norton has a pretty diverse selection of texts, so we'll be able to look at the love story, and narratives about plots and possibilities for women, from different perspectives of race, class, gender, and sexuality. My plan is to transition from Jane Eyre to the second half of the class by having us read an excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl where she says "Reader, I didn't marry him" so that we can talk about how narratives for black women were different from that of a Jane Eyre, regardless of how disadvantaged Jane may have seemed in her own story. I also plan to bring in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending to frame the second half of the class in terms of her claim that twentieth-century women writers create stories that are intentionally not leading up to the traditional happy ending of marriage.

Once I had all this in place, however, I realized that the narrative that my syllabus has a distinct problem: plenty of contemporary women's fiction, especially chick lit, is about the happy ending defined romantically. In fact, that's one of the criticisms of chick lit, and many would say that chick lit is unfairly dismissed for exactly those reasons. So, by focusing on literary fiction that writes beyond the ending I'm not really staying true to the debates about what women are allowed to write or the ways in which women's fiction isn't always taken seriously.

Given that the semester is only 14 weeks long, and I can't pile on as much reading as I'd like, what would a women's lit syllabus that takes these questions into account look like? Something tells me that it is going to be several semesters before I have any answers.

The History of Mysteries: Miss Cayley, Detective

Grant Allen's Miss Cayley

Grant Allen serialized "Miss Cayley's Adventures" in the Strand magazine in 1898. The Strand is best known as the magazine where the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared. Capitalizing on the popularity of mysteries and the rise of feminists known as "New Women," Allen created an independent female detective who decides to solve the problem of supporting herself by traveling round the world in search of adventures. She turns out to be extremely resourceful as she solves mysteries, exposes fraud and hypocrisy, and upends expectations about proper womanhood. 

Anyone who's familiar with Allen's The Woman Who Did knows that his feminist credentials are questionable at best. This story is still worth reading, though, and Allen has created a likable, opinionated character in Miss Cayley.

The first installment, "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Woman," is available here.

From "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Woman"