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Is there such a thing as a female literary imagination - a special
brand of insight and intuition that characterises women's writing?
Is there something about a novel, whether by Jane Austen, Charlotte
Bronte or Doris Lessing, that tells us that it could only have been
written by a woman? Do the subject matter, form and style that
women choose throw light on the way they think and feel? In this
brilliant and highly readable book, originally published in 1976,
Patricia Spacks analyses the female view of the world. Juxtaposing
- sometimes in startlingly original combination some eighty books
written between the seventeenth century and the present day she
uses both literary and psychological analysis to explore patterns
that recur again and again in the stories women tell - whether
about their own lives or the lives of their fictional characters.
She dissects female experience in the twentieth century as viewed
by an array of writers ranging from Kate Millet to Virginia Woolf;
examines the interplay of social passivity and psychic power that
dominates characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, the
altruism that impels Jane Austen's and Mrs Gaskell's heroines, the
'acceptance' of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Ramsey, the personal and
social conflicts that beset so many of the adolescent girls that
figure in both nineteenth-century and contemporary literature;
reveals the complex motives that can be bound up in a women's
deliberate choice of the artist's role, as appears in the writings
of Isadora Duncan's and Dora Carrington, Marie Bashkirtseff and
Mary McCartney - and the surprising forms 'freedom' can take, as
for Beatrice Webb in the East End of London or Isak Dinerson in the
wilds of Africa... The voices echo and re-echo across the years in
fascinating counter-point. Their range is enormous - rebels and
reformers, actresses and painters, Society ladies and unknown girls
in small towns, novels, poems, memoirs, diaries and letters, both
English and American, and alongside classics such as Wuthering
Heights and well-known modern works such as The Bell Jar, Patricia
Spacks introduces an intriguing selection of relatively unknown
writers, such as Napoleon's psychoanalyst great-niece Marie
Bonaparte, the Victorian arch-fantasist Mary MacLane and the
autobiography of a seventeenth-century Duchess. The Female
Imagination is much more than a study of women's writing. It is an
inquiry into the nature of female thought, self-expression and
experience. As such it should appeal to every educated woman - and
to many men too.
Sense and Sensibility (1811) marked the auspicious debut of a
novelist identified only as "A Lady." Jane Austen's name has since
become as familiar as Shakespeare's, and her tale of two sisters
has lost none of its power to delight. Patricia Meyer Spacks guides
readers to a deeper appreciation of the richness of Austen's
delineation of her heroines, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they
experience love, romance, and heartbreak. On display again in the
editor's running commentary are the wit and light touch that
delighted readers of Spacks's Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated
Edition. In her notes, Spacks elucidates language and allusions
that have become obscure (What are Nabobs? When is rent day?),
draws comparisons to Austen's other work and to that of her
precursors, and gives an idea of how other critics have seen the
novel. In her introduction and annotations, she explores Austen's
sympathy with both Elinor and Marianne, the degree to which the
sisters share "sense" and "sensibility," and how they must learn
from each other. Both manage to achieve security and a degree of
happiness by the novel's end. Austen's romance, however, reveals
darker overtones, and Spacks does not leave unexamined the issue of
the social and psychological restrictions of women in Austen's era.
As with other volumes in Harvard's series of Austen novels, Sense
and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition comes handsomely illustrated
with numerous color reproductions that vividly recreate Austen's
world. This will be an especially welcome addition to the library
of any Janeite.
A celebratory history and appreciation of the varied, wildly
experimental nature of fiction in eighteenth-century England In
this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia
Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early
history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the
traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel
to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the
genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly
established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom
Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less familiar texts
such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play)
and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of
adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous
subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted
and unpredictable process of growth and change. Investigating
fiction throughout the 1700s, Spacks delineates the individuality
of specific texts while suggesting connections among novels. She
sketches a wide range of forms and themes, including Providential
narratives, psychological thrillers, romans a clef, sentimental
parables, political allegories, Gothic romances, and many others.
These multiple narrative experiments show the impossibility of
thinking of eighteenth-century fiction simply as a precursor to the
nineteenth-century novel, Spacks shows. Instead, the vast variety
of engagements with the problems of creating fiction demonstrates
that literary history-by no means inexorable-might have taken quite
a different course.
This revised Norton Critical Edition is based on the first edition
text (dated 1818, but likely issued in late 1817). The editor has
spelled out ampersands and made superscript letters lowercased. The
novel, which is accompanied by revised and expanded explanatory
annotations, is followed by the two canceled chapters that comprise
Persuasion's original ending. "Backgrounds and Contexts" collects
contemporary assessments of Jane Austen as well as materials
relating to the social issues of the day. Included are an excerpt
from William Hayley's 1785 "Essay on Old Maids"; Austen's letters
to Fanny Knight, which reveal her skepticism about marriage as the
key to happiness; Henry Austen's memorial tribute to his famous
sister; assessments by nineteenth-century critics Julia Kavanagh
and Goldwin Smith, who viewed Austen as an unassuming, sheltered,
and "feminine" rural writer; and the perspective of Austen's
biographer, Geraldine Edith Mitten. The Second Edition emphasizes
current critical scholarship, reflecting enormous shifts in our
comprehension of Austen's achievement and opening the door to new
ways of thinking about Persuasion and its author. For the first
time, we can think complexly about Austen living through the
Napoleonic Wars on the Continent and experiencing their political
repercussions at home-the same as everyone else in England at that
time. Four new essays-by Linda Bree, Sidney Gottlieb, John
Wiltshire, and David Monaghan-speak to these new perspectives;
those by Gottlieb and Monaghan expand the conversation into film
adaptations of the novel. A Chronology of Austen's life and work,
new to the Second Edition, is included along with an updated
Selected Bibliography.
After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English
female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited
several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female
Spectator, was the first modern periodical written by a woman and
addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of
articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and
satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the
broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class
women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is
the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist
awareness.
By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless
perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for
women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous
marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of
education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad
range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and
the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They
allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and
promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing
informed relations with nature.
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia
Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of
novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young
adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread,
canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but
didn't, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn't to have liked but
did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom.
On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating,
results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of
intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why
do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the
plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen's fiction
reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children
love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And
why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The
Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What
pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it
answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are
so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)?
Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves.
It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we
reread, have both changed and remained the same.
This book offers a witty explanation of why boredom both haunts and
motivates the literary imagination. Moving from Samuel Johnson to
Donald Barthelme, from Jane Austen to Anita Brookner, Spacks shows
us at last how we arrived in a postmodern world where boredom is
the all-encompassing name we give our discontent. Her book,
anything but boring, gives us new insight into the cultural
usefulness--and deep interest--of boredom as a state of mind.
After Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood was the most important English
female novelist of the early eighteenth century. She also edited
several serial newspapers, the most important of which, the Female
Spectator, was the first modern periodical written by a woman and
addressed to a female audience. This fully annotated collection of
articles selected from the Female Spectator includes romantic and
satiric fiction, moral essays, and social commentary, covering the
broad range of concerns shared by eighteenth-century middle-class
women. Perhaps most compelling to a twentieth-century audience is
the evidence of what we might be tempted to call feminist
awareness.
By no means revolutionary in her attitudes, Haywood nonetheless
perceives the inequities of her periods social conditions for
women. She offers pragmatic advice, such as how to avoid disastrous
marriages, how to deal with wandering husbands, and what kind of
education women should seek. The essays also report on a broad
range of social actualities, from the craze for tea drinking and
the dangers of gossip to the problem of compulsive gambling. They
allude to such larger matters as politics, war, and diplomacy, and
promote the importance of science and the urgency of developing
informed relations with nature.
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Privacy (Hardcover)
Patricia Meyer Spacks
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R1,478
Discovery Miles 14 780
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Today we consider privacy a right to be protected. But in
eighteenth-century England, privacy was seen as a problem, even a
threat. Women reading alone and people hiding their true thoughts
from one another in conversation generated fears of uncontrollable
fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.
In "Privacy," Patricia Meyer Spacks explores eighteenth-century
concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid
public scrutiny and social pressure. She examines, for instance,
the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their
innermost feelings and how, in fact, people were taught to employ
such devices. She considers the erotic overtones that privacy
aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And perhaps most
important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal
threat--one that bred pretense and hypocrisy in its practitioners.
Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding,
and Sterne, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries,
autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography written during the
period, Spacks ultimately shows how writers charted the imaginative
possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will
fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent
demise.
"Desire and Truth" offers a major reassessment of the history of
eighteenth-century fiction by showing how plot challenges or
reinforces conventional categories of passion and rationality.
Arguing that fiction creates and conveys its essential truths
through plot, Patricia Meyer Spacks demonstrates that
eighteenth-century fiction is both profoundly realistic and
consistently daring.
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