Date of Award

Fall 2025

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

English

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

James Krasner

Second Advisor

Robin Hackett

Third Advisor

Sandya Shetty

Abstract

Though the Victorian era is often viewed as “the age of female novelists,” many of the most prolific and popular women writers of the time have been belittled, ignored, and forgotten. While the feminist literary recovery work of the 1980s and 1990s has brought many of these women back into scholarly consciousness, they have still not gained the respect given to their more famous yet less prolific contemporaries: the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. In this dissertation, I argue that the reason can be found in a criticism frequently applied to these women writers both in their own time and ours: “She wrote too much.” The overproduction critique rose out of Victorian biases about class and gender and encompasses three other major criticisms: the writer worked within popular genres, the writing was poor quality, and the writer wrote to make money rather than to create art. Women writers were often labelled as popular novelists writing for the lower classes while male writers were viewed as high culture novelists writing for an educated, upper-class audience. These biases have carried over into twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism, resulting in the disparity found in the modern literary canon.My dissertation focuses on three women novelists from between the 1850s and 1880s: Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Riddell, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Through close readings of their works, letters, and lives, I examine the accusations of overproduction faced by these authors, their responses to these accusations, and how these accusations have affected their reputation and canonicity over time. I also use a distant reading approach to show the overproduction critique as a systemic problem in the modern canonization of women writers. While the biases resulting in the overproduction critique began in the Victorian era, they were not left behind as time moved forward. By dismantling the overproduction critique and how it has been used to suppress Victorian women’s writing, my research asks readers to examine society’s negative attitudes toward the many modern women writers and artists who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, are accused of writing too much.

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