Women's writing:
their participation in the literary field

This part of the site will present women authors for whom records in the database WomenWriters are suggesting the importance, or women who have been researched. Focus will be on the attitude women writers adopted when engaging themselves in dialogues by publishing their works. How are readers addressed? In what sense these authors replied to preceding events or publications by others.

The word “author” is used in its broadest sense: women who wrote and published either fiction or non-fiction, books or contributions to the periodical press, their 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? These questions have been addressed during the first of the annual “NEWW November meetings”: 22 November 2007, and will be further reflected.

For this part of the site, just as anywhere, we welcome short articles to be published online, as far as they result 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:

• Dutch authors,
  
• French authors,
  
• English authors.
  

The choice of women presented here, and of countries represented, is still rather small. 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 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 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.

Authors are not to be presented only according to their nationalities. Other classifications are possible, and may be no less usefull. For example:
by genre or type of writing activity:

• translators,
  
• journalists,
  
• etc.;
  

or by origin:

• women born or/and living in Utrecht,
  
• or elsewhere;
  

by first name:

• women named Susanna or Suzanna...,
  
• or Johanna or Elisabeth;
  

or by "authors' intentions", for example:

• the choice of characters' names,
  
• the choice of narrative developments or topoï.
  
  

SvD, January 2008

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• The writing side >