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Introduction: Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel
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13081 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1987 |
322 Words |
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Dale Spender's 1986 book Mothers of the Novel is an expression of the current mood of feminist revivalism. The Virago Modern Classics series, the Oxford University Press thirty-volume Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, and the Feminist Press Classics in Fiction are a few of the reprints that are aiming to rediscover women's artistic attainment. Mothers of the Novel is the companion book to Pandora's reprint series of the same name (also edited by Dale Spender), which is making available novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by women novelists. Spender seeks to reclaim women's place in the history of literature.
The origin of the modern novel is usually traced back to the works of five men: Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Lawrence Sterne. But Spender claims that significant women writers of the same period have been virtually ignored. She assesses the achievements of these early women novelists and documents their popularity at the time. Spender concludes that "women were mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation."
Spender's other books include Man Made Language (Routledge, 1980; 1985), Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (Routledge, 1982), There's Always Been a Women's Movement This Century (Pandora, 1983), For the Record (Women's Press, 1985), The Education Papers: Women's Quest for Equality in Britain 1850-1912 (Routledge, 1987). She is also editor of the journal Women's Studies International Forum.
Spender's theories on the origins of the novel are discussed by Ian Watt, author of The Rise of
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