To many of his contemporaries (and to many of ours), it seemed that the nineteenth century was the Age of the Female Novelist. Paradoxically, Mill would never have raised this point had women not already claimed a very important literary place. “If women lived in a different country from men,” Mill thought, “and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own.” Instead, he reasoned, they would always be imitators and never innovators. Writing about female creativity in The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill argued that women would have a hard struggle to overcome the influence of male literary tradition, and to create an original, primary, and independent art. Yet we have never been sure what unites them as women, or, indeed, whether they share a common heritage connected to their womanhood at all. English women writers have never suffered from the lack of a reading audience, nor have they wanted for attention from scholars and critics.
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