Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1977)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "The Female Tradition." In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing, pp. 3-36. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1977.

In the following excerpt, Showalter discusses the implications of identifying female sensibilities in the literary output of nineteenth-century female authors, identifying three distinct phases in the development of themes and gender battles as addressed in women's writing in the nineteenth century.

The advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience: in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world, it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences.…Buthitherto … the literature of women has fallen short of its functions owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness—it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write...