Category: women’s rights
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Woolf’s Fascination with Austen
Virginia Woolf is famous for two remarks about Jane Austen. In The Common Reader, Woolf says that Austen’s juvenilia and unfinished works “offer the best criticism of the masterpieces. Here her difficulties are more apparent, and the method she took to overcome them less artfully concealed.” A lack of development in these works, she remarks,…
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Did Regency Women Really Swoon?
Why are women so often fainting in Regency and Victorian romances? Is this a trope, or was swooning really a thing?
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Why You Should Marry Your Cousin: Regency Rules of Courtship
A few tips for navigating your way through the courtship maze in Regency England
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First and Last of Mary Shelley’s Humankind
Mary Shelley holds the distinction of having written—two hundred years ago—the story of the first of a new kind of human, who is created and animated by science, and the last of the old order of humanity, which is felled by a pandemic. The first novel, her well-known Frankenstein (1818), invented the science-fiction genre. The…
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Jane Austen and a Women’s Right to Refuse
Hello Friends! April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. So, as your resident ultra-feminist, I would like to take my time this month to talk about how Jane Austen inserted themes of women’s empowerment and sexual violence into her novels and why the things she talked about over 200 years ago are still relevant. Let’s start…