CONTEMPORARIES



    Being a woman writer in that period was very difficult. The Victorianism was an age for men. Women didn’t have privileges and the way they could integrate themselves in the society was being a writer. By this way, they could claim their rights, their human rights. On the other hand, we know they had to use a pseudonymous, they couldn’t sign their works with their true name. Examples for this are the poems by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë or George Eliot whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Although her pseudonymous was chosen by her lover, a man who was married and had children.

    Women writers used a male pseudonymous, because in the Victorian society men made everything. To make themselves’ way in a male tradition was very hard, besides in this period people were afraid of changes in their lives. It was shameful a woman who wanted to be writer, a woman who wanted to do what men did, this woman should be considerate lustful, evil and despicable.

    Despite of this, I think thanks to the pseudonymous they could express their likes and dislikes of this repressive society, their thoughts, their feelings, their love and so on. But they had to take care with their words, because sometimes people thought someone was a bit mad.  This was the case of Emily Dickinson (who was an American poet). She wrote love poems to a man and she didn’t go farther than her garden gate in twenty years. Because of this, people say she was an unusual woman.

    Other contemporaries who never used pseudonymous were Elizabeth Gaskell and Elizabeth Barret Browning.

© Clara López Pueblas
Information from: http://lion.chadwyck.com
                    http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/gender/womlitov.html
 
 

Academic year 1999/2000
© a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Clara López Pueblas
Universitat de València Press



 
 
 

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