LADY MACBETH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The common picture we have of women writers in the Romantic period is one of concealment, restraint, fear of criticism, selfcensorship. While the male poets issued their manifestos, dabbled in metaphysics, or cut a dash in fashionable drawing rooms, women were, if not invisible, then confined by circumstances, and by the more intangible prison of female propriety. There is Frances Burney, forced to burn her childhood scribblings on the orders of her father and, later in life, to accept an existence of mindless tedium as lady-in-waiting to the queen. Or Charlotte Smith, who escaped from a wretched marriage at the price of churning out sentimental novels ‘like a galley slave tied to the oars’, in order to support her nine children. Or most famously Jane Austen writing in the drawing room, hurriedly hiding away her manuscripts whenever a visitor entered, and publishing anonymously through her brother. It has been influentially argued that these unfavourable conditions left an indelible mark on their imaginations, and their style of writing, that it discouraged them from overt treatment of politics or philosophy in favour of a more safely ‘feminine’ focus on the domestic and the quotidien. The argument goes that women writers chose to specialize in the depiction of personal relations in realistic settings, rather than attempting to represent more exotic locales or great public events like their male contemporaries, and that they employed a language of refined moral sentiment and feeling rather than attempting abstract ideas or grand flights of imagination. Their forte was miniaturism, attention to detail.

In the first wave of feminist literary history, the rescue of women writers from obscurity tended to involve the construction of an alternative, repressed female tradition. The subordination of women in society was proposed not only as a way of explaining the neglect of women writers, but was also found to be the constant theme of their literary work. Like all attempts to redress the balance, the dualism of male and female traditions involves a simplification of the reality and fails to account for many aspects of women's writing in the period. It has notably distorted our understanding of women's achievements in Gothic writing.