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Women writing,
and participating in the literary field



This part of the website presents women authors and their writing activities. On the basis of documentation entered by NEWW-participants into the database WomenWriters, they are shown - using quantitative and qualitative approaches - as members of groups and sub-groups, and in some cases as individual outstanding figures. The objective is to show the writers in their context - allowing discussion of the place and role of female celebrities, and also of hitherto completely unknown or unnoticed women.

As clearly the database WomenWritersis not "complete", any interpretation or conclusion based upon it must be considered as provisional, and in need of check and further reflection. This is what this website is meant for.

The word "author" is used here in its broadest sense: a woman who wrote and published either fiction or non-fiction, books or contributions to the periodical press, her own texts or translations of writings by others, comments on others’ writings, etc. Therefore, "intermediaries" are being classified here as "authors".

This large definition is not wholly unproblematic. For example: what about oral literature? What about women, like Madame de Sévigné, who did not write for publication, but still exerted considerable influence, when the letters written to her daughter were published some 40 years after her death? These questions have been addressed during the first of the annual “NEWW November meetings”: 22 November 2007, and will be further discussed.


QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES


Authors can be classified - for the sake of their easily being found - according to the women's national identities. Here also problems arise, because of possible confusion between nationality and language. This is equally under discussion.


Dutch authors are over-represented, for the moment. This has to do with the fact that the first phase of the digitizing project focused on the reception of women's writing in the Netherlands and looked for traces of foreign authors finding Dutch readers. And indeed we found the names (or pseudonyms) and works of hundreds of 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....

In terms of sheer discovery, this is certainly rewarding, but more astonishing still was the amount of Dutch “authors” we found. Instead of the average dozen women that appear in current Dutch literary historiography (concerning the periods before 1900), we found more than 700 names (19th century: 400; 18th: 175; 17th: 100; earlier: 25). This sounds incredible; analyses of the data and detailed study of the reception documents themselves (starting October 2007) will have to explain our findings and may account for the discrepancy between the numbers of lost and surviving authors.

Other classifications than by nationality/language are possible, and may be no less usefull. For example:

by genre or type of writing activity:

or by place of birth or :

or by "authors' intentions", for example:

QUALITATIVE APPROACHES

[....]

SvD, February 2009




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