In Mothers of the Novel, when Dale Spender writes about her education, she doesn’t consider it inferior.

But somehow she graduated with the belief that men had invented the novel and that they’d written all the good ones.

So the table in her book (and contents overall), containing the names and selected titles by women writers who wrote and published before Jane Austen did—568 of them—is remarkable indeed.

It’s also a curious and enthusiastic reader’s delight: already arranged in a chart, it’s the perfect reading list. (There’s also lots of prose, including readable and often entertaining biographies.)

And it’s a reminder that, however good one’s formal education might be, there’s always more to learn outside the classroom.

My first reading of this book dates back to the days when I still pencilled notes in the margins of books, but most of the markings in this chart are symbols which make no sense to me now. My guess? Books I’d been able to find, shelved or on microfiche, at whatever library I had access to back then.

My early obsessions were Aphra Behn (1640-1689), along with an excellent biography by Janet Todd, and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), along with a curious fictionalised biography by Frances Sherwood (that brought out a whole new side to William Blake). In Spender’s book, the list of Behn’s works alone is more than two pages long, in frustratingly tiny print (mostly plays and verse, however).

But Spender not only drew me to pre-Austen women writers, but also post-Austen; two novels I recall as being particularly good were Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1794, pre-Austen) and Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (1818, post-Austen). Somewhere there’s a file with handwritten passages I copied from Ferrier, thoughts about marriage that I couldn’t believe were more than two centuries old.

These new possibilities encouraged me to collect long books that I was not assigned to read at school (unlike Samuel Richardson’s, say), books by Fanny Burney and Ann Radcliffe, with the idea that they were important (but without the impetus to actually read them). These are loooong books; I suppose you could say that’s why they remain unread.

When I first heard about Bill’s Australian Women Writers Gen 0 (which launched on the 14th and continues through January 21st), I thought about Burney and Radcliffe. But then I thought of the five books I wouldn’t read while engaged in even one of their novels.

And when the conversation shifted to talk of The New Woman on The Australian Legend, I thought about a set of skinny little hardcovers I bought years ago, travelling through New York State, in a second-hand shop near Cornell College. But each of them looking so interesting that I couldn’t seem to choose just one.

Still contemplating possibilities for Gen 0 Week, I returned to Mothers of the Novel and to the idea of beginning at the beginning. Or nearer to it, at least. I made ridiculously long lists of the books I thought I could find via ILL. None of which have arrived in time (the holidays and illnesses have slowed things, it seems).

Many of these early texts have been scanned/keyed and are available online, but I must limit my screen time, so I was aiming for print copies. But one of these early books available to read online is one I keyed myself, Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague.

Back when scanners were new technology and only available for institutional use, I volunteered with a group dedicated to re-“discovering” early works by women writers. The group leaders selected key texts and asked for contributors, then sent segments of the book via the U.S. postal service to fast-typers around the globe, who would key and edit and submit text files, which the organisers formatted and coded.

It was horrifying to get part of a torn-apart book in the post, but great fun to see it all come together into a whole. I never received either the beginning or end of a book, so I was always partway through the story (nearly always partly through a sentence). And not many of the books were actually interesting under those circumstances, which also made it easier to stay focussed on the typing.

As the group grew, we were asked to commit independently to larger projects (I imagine the admin hours were a thing); I chose Brooke’s 1769 novel because there weren’t many Canadian books there and because I loved epistolary novels (Les liaisons dangereuses caught me first, so sassy, and even though it was tortuous in comparison, I’d read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa too.)

Some consider Brooke’s the first Canadian novel, others the first American novel—and, as Spender might add, some don’t consider it at all. But it predates present-day “Canada” and “America”.

Brooke was an English woman, who lived in Quebec from 1763 to 1768 and sets her novel in the 1760s, after the English conquered French Canada and before the Americans to the south seceded with the revolutionary war in 1776.

It was a time of great change and shifting connections across the ocean, but Brooke’s novel focusses on two romances. In 228 letters, she details the courtships and unions—along the way providing commentary about society and mores (French, English, and Canadian). There aren’t any bridging sections and the letters vary in tone and length, according to the relationships’ development: it’s a very engaging story, if you find engagements engaging.

In his introduction to a 1968 edition of Brooke’s novel in the New Canadian Library series (which is a little like Text Publishing’s series in Australia), Carl F. Klinck does acknowledge Samuel Richardson’s influence on Brooke’s work. He considers her narrative in the context of male authorship.

In that sense, his concept of literature fits with the education that Spender received, overwhelmingly populated by men. But he does mention Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox, and Fanny Burney. He even includes an excerpt from Fanny Burney’s diary, describing Frances Brooke (though it says as much about Burney herself as anyone else):

“[She] is very short and fat, and squints, but has the art of showing agreeable ugliness. She is very well bred, and expressed herself with much modesty upon all subjects; which in an authoress, a woman of known understanding, is extremely pleasing.”

Klinck’s commentary refers to two other writers that appear in Spender’s volume and he does include a woman’s words amongst his own. He even celebrates Brooke’s novel, calling it a tour de force.

As Spender writes in her “Myth of the Isolated Achievement” chapter:

“There is no good reason that women should not be equally represented in the galleries of the literary great. No good reason, that is, in relation to women; only good reasons that relate to men, and dominance.”

Thanks to Bill, for encouraging a backwards glance, in the direction of our literary grandmothers. Later this week, I’ll write about Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (2023), which is partly a consideration of four early women writers (mostly writing philosophy, not fiction) and partly a memoir.

Follow along all week, at The Australian Legend.