The Ordeal of Female Genius: Aphra Behn Across Centuries (e-kitap)

The study of women’s writing could be traced back to the eighth century BC, when in his Catalogue of Women, Hesoid listed heroines and goddesses; Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in the work Moralia.2 As for the English Literature, it has no valid information about professional women writers up to the seventeenth century. In her seminal work A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf finds it odd not to have encountered any sixteenth century women writers’ names in the British Museum. The eighteenth-century British examples included George Ballard’s (1752) Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences and John Duncombe’s Feminiad treating women as a distinct categorywith a misogynist discourse. Women writers were also interested in the history of women’s writing. Mary Scott’s The Female Advocate: A Poem Occassioned by Reading Mr Duncombe’s Feminiad published in 1774 is one of the best-known works in tracing a woman’s tradition in writing. Mary Hays, in 1803, published the six-volume Female Biography. In 1929, Virginia Woolf, as mentioned above, too, explores the tradition of women’s writing in her A Room of One’s Own. Additionally, anthologies and collections of women’s writing continued to be published. Yet some women writers are under the neglect of recognition due to insufficient historical data.