Quantities
All of us (English colleagues possibly excepted) know well that, when telling that we are doing research on women writers before the 20th century, we have to answer the question: “Did they exist?”. This question is in line with what was taught until quite recently in universities and schools, for instance in the famous Knuvelder manual of Dutch literature: 25 women, not even completely pre-1900 (I have not been into counting male names in the index):
G.P.M. Knuvelder, Beknopt handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde (1982, 10th ed.):
A 19th-century anthology of female poets contains a lot more 17th- and 18th-century women. The book participates in this vogue described by Hilde Hoogenboom in her article about bio-bibliographical compilations of “female worthies” and famous women.
A.J. van der Aa, Parelen uit de lettervruchten van Nederlandsche dichteressen (1856):
The authors of a much more recent anthology of Dutch-language women authors have been discovering 150 female authors active between 1550 and 1850:
Riet Schenkeveld-van der Dussen et al., Met en zonder lauwerkrans. Schrijvende vrouwen uit de vroegmoderne tijd (1997):
But it is only when doing more systematic research in sources such as library catalogues, periodical press, or lists of translations, that numbers really rise:
Database WomenWriters (now):
- over 750 women born before 1875
This large number of female authors in such a small country is to be explained in part by the fact that we included also women who translated or rewrote texts by others. Related to the question of the numbers is the one of definition. Are the following women definitely to be considered as authors?
- Magdalena van Schinne: a woman living in The Hague in a formerly rich family, she was keeping a diary, where she is imagining that someone two centuries later will find and read it...
- Sophie van Würtemberg: the Dutch Queen, quite unhappy in her marriage, reading George Sand, and taking example on her in a manuscript entitled Histoire de ma vie after Sand’s Histoire de ma vie...
- Anne van der Tholl: the wife of one of the famous literary critics, Conrad Busken Huet, and only recently “coming out” as an author and translator herself, possibly more important for her husband than currently supposed...
- Jenny Kerkhoven: a character in Heren van de thee (1992), a novel by Hella S. Haasse. But the novel was based on family archives – and it was in one of these archives that Haasse found these feelings of Jenny’s husband, some time after her death, which was a suicide. The story is in the Dutch East Indies, where the husband is completely happy, but his wife less so. Now, after her death, he finally realizes that after a stay of several months in Holland she had not been quite the same as before, she had wanted to write – and he had not helped her.
All these women were kept away from writing or from publishing or being recognized, by norms dominating femininity. In a women’s literary history, norms play a still more important role than in so-called “general” literary history.
How many more of these women can we find? And what to do, in terms of including or not into databases? These four are all included in the database WomenWriters– for the moment. By including them, we in fact follow the “example” provided by Joseph de La Porte who in the 18th century made this bio-bibliographical compilation entitled Histoire litteraire des femmes francaises (discussed by Hilde Hoogenboom in her article). For quite a number of women – not only those included in this list – La Porte specifies that he does not know if they actually
wrote.
Suzan van Dijk, updated May 2010
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