Woman writer

“ In an examination into the psychology and methods of the woman writer, two things should be clearly kept in mind. The first is that of all professions open to both sexes, writing should furnish the most reliable conclusions in regard to the relative accomplishment of men and women; for from Sappho’s day to ours a woman has been as free to write as a man. Life is the only university in which a writer can be trained, and that university has always been strictly coeducational. Neither have there ever been any restrictions, commercial or social, to bar a woman’s way to the literary career. ”

“ There are too many mute Miltons, too easily silenced, among my sex; but on the other hand—a fact equally due to the feminine fusion of living and writing—history has shown, perhaps will always show, that woman’s most valid intellectual achievement is in literature.
As a writer-worker, I have found no way of getting even with my limitations except by frankly shouldering them. The body my soul bears upon its back is a heavier burden to carry than a man’s, and I find I cannot accomplish the pilgrimage if I give up my own little jog-trot for a man’s stride. ”

“ A woman’s talent both for being a woman and for being a writer is measured by the force and the accuracy of her intuitions. My intuitions in regard to the people about me, when duly transformed into story-stuff, have a definite market value. If I did not possess them, I could not conceive, make, or sell a single manuscript. Supersensitive impressions necessitate the supersensitive channels by which a woman’s outer world connects with her inner one. If I will have woman’s intuitions, I must have my woman’s nervous system. ”

“ A large number of literary females are excellent needle-women, and good housewives; and there is no reason why they should not be. The same vigour of character and activity of intellect which renders a woman a good writer, will also enable her to acquire with a quickness, almost intuitive, a competent knowledge of household affairs, and of the art of needle-work. ”

“ How does it place women in her relation to the arts?
Consider what are the qualities essential to success in any one of the arts. Are not the most essential of these a quick reception of impressions, added to an acute memory for all that has been experienced? The poet and the writer can reach deeper into the nature of others, the architect, the sculptor, the painter can see more clearly, the musician hear more finely; and so it is with all the arts. Does not the genius, or even the man of talent, take his place as one who understands incomparably more than others ”

“ She is not only a very clever writer, but has as much wisdom as wit in her woman's brain. In our conversations she did not discover any extreme opinions, such as are held by some brilliant female writers, but seemed to have a mind well balanced, with a great deal of good common sense as well as womanly feeling, and a brave heart to help her struggling sisters in America, and all over the world. ”

“ Hence if in any work the women are found to be well and sympathetically drawn, while the men are mechanical and by comparison perfunctorily treated, it is, I imagine, safe to infer that the writer is a woman ”

“ She is a contributor to several magazines and newspapers, and at one time was a regular reporter on the staff of the Moston "Sunday Record." She is an easy, graceful writer, both in prose and poetry. Her poem, "When Womanhood Awakes," is considered one of the most inspiring among the poems written in the behalf of women. ”

“ She has acquired knowledge, “read up” literature, and to some extent digested philosophy; but she applies her powers, her culture, and her training—from practice and association with professional writers—to the amplification and rounding off of woman’s art. She established domestic realism by the expression of feminine insight. She is content to leave other things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is only a modern form of the old story. Her heart, and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly. ”

“ Having had so much of this, and rather weak health to struggle against, it is the greatest wonder to me that she has been able to write as many books as she has done, and in so bright a spirit as many are written. Of course, real womanly woman's work is the highest work, but I think few writers put it so entirely above the professional work as she does. ”

“ The Woman Who Writes I OFTEN wonder how other women write. Workers in art material are chary of revealing processes that might save other workers wasted effort and vain experiment, or, better yet, provoke challenge still more conducive to success. I venture to believe that any woman’s literary product is a matter of constant, and often desperate, compromise between writing and living; and some examination into the wherefore of this fact may throw light on the nature of writing processes, if not also on the nature of woman processes. ”

“ It is not often, however, that women writers present us with philosophical treatises in the guise of novels. Their high-water mark of workmanship is the Family Herald type of story-telling, even as crystoleum-painting and macramé-work exhaust the energies and imagination of the majority of women ‘art’ workers. ”

“ And this leads us to the heart of the question, what does the literature of women mean? It means this: while it is impossible for men to express life otherwise than as they know it—and they can only know it profoundly according to their own experience—the advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience; in other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the social world, it still remains true that men and women have different organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you must have both sides depicted. ”

“ I have long felt and regretted that many able female writers are doing much to perpetuate the petty vices of a sex, which, after all, is at present but half educated, by devoting three thick volumes to such empty women as Biography, though a lower art than Fiction, would not waste three pages on. They plead truth and fidelity to nature. ”

“ Who can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running backward? ”

“ So far have we travelled from the pristine realities of truth and purity. We lie to our children—in the interests of morality.
After a time, in the intervals between doing her journalistic work and nursing Alan’s baby, Herminia found leisure to write a novel. It was seriously meant, of course, but still it was a novel. That is every woman’s native idea of literature. It reflects the relatively larger part which the social life plays in the existence of women. If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that interests him. ”

“ And every critic who forms a high estimate of the share women may ultimately take in literature, will on principle abstain from any exceptional indulgence toward the productions of literary women. For it must be plain to every one who looks impartially and extensively into feminine literature that its greatest deficiencies are due hardly more to the want of intellectual power than to the want of those moral qualities that contribute to literary excellence—patient diligence, a sense of the responsibility involved in publication, and an appreciation of the sacredness of the writer's art. ”

“ With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career, and destructive apparently of that emancipation which is the present dream of her champions, what a type, what a motive this for fiction, and in what a manifold and stimulating way is the Novel awakening to its high privilege to deal with such material. In this view, having these wider implications in mind, the role of woman in fiction, so far from waning, is but just begun. ”

“ She is as far from realism as an “unromantic” writer can well be; and, by sheer force of will or vividness of imagination, compels and fascinates us to accept, as worthy of study and full of interest, the characters she has created.
And because, as has been often noticed, women are—curiously enough—not usually pre-eminent in imagination, her work remains supreme for certain qualities, which we may vainly seek elsewhere in English literature. ”

“ PROUDHON. Literary women! As if there were any! "The woman author does not exist; she is a contradiction. The part of woman in literature is the same as in manufactures; she is useful where genius is no longer of service, like a needle or a bobbin.
"By cutting out of a woman's book all that is borrowed, imitated, gleaned, and common-place, we reduce it to a few pretty sayings; philosophy on nothing. To the community of ideas, woman brings nothing of her own, any more than to generation." ”

“ No woman ever wrote a great drama; not one of the world's great poems came from a woman's hand. In their own domain of fiction women have been, and occasionally are, great realists, great portrait-painters, great masters of style, great psychologists—but not great inventors, and very seldom inventors at all. ”

“ Speaking, then, as one of the common herd—the public—I ask myself why it is that as a rule woman's art leaves me cold, woman's literature unconvinced, dissatisfied, and even irritated? And the only answer I can find is that they are artificial; that they are not a representation of life or beauty seen by a woman's eyes, but an attempt to render life or beauty as man desires that a woman should see and render it. ”

“ As a specimen of the good take the following passage, on the phenomena of what I have spoken of, as the lyrical or electric element in woman.
“Women have been seen to show themselves poets in the most pathetic pantomimic scenes, where all the passions were depicted full of beauty; and these poets used a language unknown to themselves, and the performance once over, their inspiration was a forgotten dream. Without doubt there is an interior development to beings so gifted, but their sole mode of communication with us is their talent. ”

“ I am inclined to think the latter by far the greater artist, just as I am inclined to think that in literature rather than in any other form of mental activity will always be found woman’s highest intellectual achievement, for the simple reason that woman’s genius consists in personality, and for the expression of personality words are the only adequate medium. ”

“ And when we analyze the most renowned of the novels by which women have attained fame, we discover that the best of these deal exclusively with the narrower regions of conduct, and with the more restricted areas of life with which she is most familiar as a woman, and that when she seeks to go outside her incomplete experience of existence she soon makes us aware of the gaps in her equipment. ”

“ It is often asked by thoughtful foreigners why American women, who are free to pursue any career they like, with ample privileges of education and the universal reign of the literary club, have produced no writers of the first order, measured even by the standards of their own sex. ”

“ The rush of women into the artistic and literary professions has always had a singularly ill effect upon technique, for the woman’s mind is normally incapable of rising to an appreciation of the possibilities of any medium. ”

“ We have read these volumes with feelings of delight far warmer than the writer, in her sincerely modest preface, would seem to expect from any reader, and cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigour and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience, and command of classic allusion, above any female writer the world has yet known.
In the first quality, especially, most female writers are deficient. They do not grasp a subject with simple energy, nor treat it with decision of touch. ”

“ Is this a strong statement, a libel upon the female sex? But you read novel after novel in which the larger number of women—all, perhaps, except the heroine—are represented as artful, sly, deceitful, managing; and generally the main object of their artifice is to secure a husband for themselves or for their daughters: yet you do not at once cry out in indignant protest against such misrepresentation. On the contrary, you follow the plot with lively interest, think the author has a very clear insight into human nature, and especially excels in the delineation of female character! ”

“ I will not dispute whether the Novel makes the woman, or the woman makes the Novel; or whether they are written to engage your attention, or flatter your vanity. I believe the results will shew they depend, in some measure, upon each other; and an uninformed woman, by reading them, only augments the number of her futile ideas. The female mind, notwithstanding, is competent to any talk, and the accomplishments of an elegant woman depend on a proper cultivation of her intelligent powers; a barrenness—a sterility of conversation—immediately discovers where this cultivation is wanting. ”

“ And he exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the business of the Novel to represent? ”