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Women’s University Fiction, 1880-1945 (2014) by Anna Bogen

2016; University of Alberta Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.55016/ojs/ajer.v61i2.55884

1923-1857

Jennifer Helgren,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

Anna Bogen sets out to challenge interpretations of women's university fiction as flat or failed.Her sophisticated literary analysis of early 20thcentury university fiction, or coming-of-age fiction within the Oxbridge (University of Oxford in Oxford, England, and University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England) setting, adds to our understanding of women's place in the university and demonstrates how gender affects genre.Bogen sees university fiction as a particular subgenre of Bildungsroman in which the main character reaches self-realization and an independent subject position through education.Comparing men's and women's novels, Bogen argues that women's exclusion from the center of university life made it difficult for women authors to comfortably fit their narratives into the traditional Bildungsroman structure.However, rather than jettison the genre, women authors used it to expose women's marginality in the university and in the process, exposed the genre's tensions.Bogen's texts include those that received critical analyses, such as Compton Mackenzie's foundational Sinister Street (1913), Virginia Woolf's "A Woman's College from the Outside" (1926), and Rosamond Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927) as well as texts that many critics ignored.Bogen's book complements Elaine Showalter's Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (2005), an examination of university fiction after World War II, but it is the first sustained analysis of early 20th-century women's university fiction in England.Bogen successfully contextualizes the university novel within the variety of challenges modernity posed to late 19th-century universities but her central concern is women's place in the university as they began to attend in large numbers.Although separated in women's colleges like Girton, women studied at Oxford and Cambridge as early as 1869.They still faced "trenchant opposition" (p.16), including a quota system to limit their numbers at Oxford, which was in force until the 1920s.University administrations barred women from voting faculty positions and from extracurricular activities, and women coped with prevailing fears that learning eroded women's health.Mass enlistments of Oxbridge men during World War I and evolving sexual attitudes that reflected popular psychology prompted further female enrollments.Women finally earned Oxford degrees in 1920 and full equal membership at Cambridge in 1948.Before then, the women's colleges had only unofficial recognition.Women might have been permitted to sit for exams but it was largely at the discretion of male dons and women earned only titular degrees.Thus Oxbridge accorded women educational opportunities outside the home, a central feature of Bildungsroman, but because women remained marginalized within institutions of higher learning, self-discovery and social integration were only partially possible for women.