Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1977)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel." In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing, pp. 73-99. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Showalter describes how women authors in the Victorian age, including George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, were unable to escape the condescending judgment of critics who refused to believe that women were capable of producing art that was equal to that of men.

To their contemporaries, nineteenth-century women writers were women first, artists second. A woman novelist, unless she disguised herself with a male pseudonym, had to expect critics to focus on her femininity and rank her with the other women writers of her day, no matter how diverse their subjects or styles. The knowledge that their individual achievement would be subsumed under a relatively...