The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel Book

Women have found a powerful and authentic voice in the novel above all other literary forms. Indeed, Rosalind Miles asserts that women have achieved supremacy in the writing of fiction, capturing the height of a traditional male stronghold. But what does this victory amount to? Do women writers today, enjoying possession of the citadel, still find that they have to re-invent in every generation their right to speak out as women? The stature and achievement of the great women novelists of the past - Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot - is beyond dispute. But their success has conferred on them the status of "honorary men", a designation which neatly avoids the issue of their distinctively female contribution to the development of the novel form. In this century, Rosalind Miles argues, such evasion has become impossible. The issue has changed with the new context. Is it true to say that women write a different kind of novel from men? Have the rules been re-written with the supremacy of the woman novelist in our own day? Rosalind Miles looks at this problem and answers its implications by looking at the female tradition in the novel and its impact on the work of women novelists writing today.Read More