Women's writing:
their participation in the literary field
This part of the site will in the near future present women authors for whom records in the database WomenWriters are showing the importance, or for whom further research has been done. Focus will be on their attitude in the dialogues they are undertaking by publishing their works: messages to an intended readership, “answers” to preceding events or publications by others.
In this programme, those considered as “authors” are women who wrote and published, either fiction or non-fiction, either books or contributions to the periodical press, either their own texts or translations of texts by others, comments on others’ writings, etc. Therefore, “intermediaries” are being classified here as “authors”.
This provisional definition is of course not wholly unproblematic: what about oral forms of literature, for example? Wat about women, like Madame de Sévigné, who did not write for publication, but exerted considerable influence? These questions will be addressed in the first of the annual “NEWW November meetings” to be organized in Utrecht (November 22, 2007; Drift 23; more details will follow).
In this part of the site, just as anywhere, we welcome short articles to be published online, as far as they are resulting from research facilitated by the database WomenWriters (propositions are subject to decision by the editorial board). Articles are presented - only for the sake of easily being found - according to the women's national identities:
The choice of women presented here, and of countries represented, is still rather small. This is directly related to the fact that during the digitizing project we focused on the reception of women's writing in the Netherlands: we intended to find traces of foreign authors finding Dutch readers. And indeed we found the names (or pseudonyms) and works of about 1550 non-Dutch authors having found readership in the Netherlands before c.1900. This means for example that the database WomenWriters contains the names of and any information about:
- 210 authors from Germany,
- 80 from the United States,
- 65 from Sweden,
- 80 from Italy, or writing in Italian (example which is illustrating the difficulty of classifying authors... The question will be discussed in one of our upcoming meetings.)
In terms of sheer discovery, this is certainly rewarding, but more astonishing still were the numbers we found of Dutch “authors”. Instead of the about 10 or 15 women’s names to be encountered in current Dutch literary historiography (concerning the periods before 1900), we reached a number of more than 700 names (19th century: 400; 18th: 175; 17th: 100; earlier: 25). This sounds incredible; analysis of the data and detailed study of the reception documents themselves (starting October 2007), in relation to the women’s works, will have to explain our findings.
Authors are not to be presented only according to their nationalities. Other classifications are possible, and may be no less usefull. For example:
- translators,
- journalists,
- etc.
or:
or even:
SvD, September 2007
- Note that informations contained in the database WomenWriters have been derived from contemporary sources, which may contain errors. Also important: when arriving in the database WomenWriters, your status is: "not logged on", which means that you have only partial view. For complete view and participation in the project, take contact.
- The writing side >