Julia Kavanagh, English Women of Letters, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Using a trope from Julia Kavanagh’s writing, the public examination or trial, this essay examines the Irish writer’s evaluation of the literary qualities of women writers profiled in English Women of Letters. The conceptual alignment between public examination and literary evaluation underlies Kavanagh’s protofeminist approach to judging the work of Victorian women writers who were held to a double critical standard: they were expected to demonstrate qualities normally associated with women (refinement, sentiment, and high moral tone) but not to demonstrate ones associated with men, such as intelligence or power. Despite her conventional appeals to authority and acceptance of moral judgments and feminine norms, Kavanagh – the first to use the term “women of letters” – manages to claim for the writers she profiles a place in the literary hierarchy.