Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1977)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "The Female Aesthetic." In A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, pp. 240-62. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

In the following essay, Showalter contends that many women writers of the early twentieth century reacted to the violence of the First World War and the almost-masculine nature of the feminist movement by attempting to create a new kind of writing that offered a retreat from the real world rather than an expression of it.

The last generation of Victorian women novelists began to publish during the suffrage campaigns and the First World War. Suffragette writers had taken up John Stuart Mill's challenge to transmute the moral issues of Victorian feminism into an...