The politics of writing: Julia Kavanagh, 1824–77

Download or read book The politics of writing: Julia Kavanagh, 1824–77 written by Eileen Fauset and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically engaged study Eileen Fauset sees Kavanagh as a significant but neglected writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing. With few known primary sources to go on, the author manages, through her skilful selection of letters, official documents and historical commentary, to piece together some of the jigsaw of Kavanagh's life. Throughout this study, the biographical element informs and directs discussion of Kavanagh's writing itself. What emerges is a succinct and telling portrait of a woman who, through a desire to write, acquired both economic independence and a means through which she could voice her sexual politics. Eileen Fauset challenges the historical attitudes to 'popular romance', a genre read mainly by women and generally discounted as simple entertainment. She argues that in Kavanagh's novels romance is often the pivot around which issues of cultural and sexual difference are examined, a perspective that, invariably, also informed Kavanagh's non-fiction. It will appeal to academics, students and enthusiasts of Victorian literature and women's writing.