Ellen Scheible, Bridgewater State University
Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 113-133

This article examines the ways in which Irish women writers have employed the Irish domestic interior as a representation of the female body in national poli­tics from the late nineteenth century through the present. Using The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Angela Bourke’s classic case study of the murder of a nineteenth-century woman, to introduce the biopolitics underlying the modern Irish female body as a metaphor for the Irish nation, this article shows how that metaphor continues to resonate in twentieth-century texts written both during Irish independence and the massive economic changes of the Celtic Tiger years. Comparing work by Elizabeth Bowen and Pamela Hinkson to the contemporary detective fiction of Tana French, I argue that both the modernist era and the period after the fall of the Celtic Tiger, particularly after the great recession of 2008, were transformative times in Ireland where discussions of Irish feminine subjectivity offered hybridized understandings of gender and power during moments of great change for the nation. The textual reverberations of the Bridget Cleary story show us how a woman’s body can become a metonymical symbol for both progress and oppression in modern Ireland, exposing the tense relationship between modernity and tradition in Irish culture that is the backbone of Irish identity throughout much of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Shand, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 91-112

This article argues for a broader inclusion of public criticism within recep­tion histories, using suffrage discourse on Jane Austen as a case study. It argues that although public criticism, aimed at ordinary and everyday readers, is regularly overlooked in academic discourse, its methodologies invite compelling and timely re-readings; in the case of Austen, public critics originated an unequivocally feminist reception. An exami­nation of the debates over Austen’s femininity or feminism in suffrage periodicals from the 1910s and 1920s locates the origins of Austen’s feminist criticism in suffrage voices rather than second-wave feminist scholarship. This article presents previously undiscussed suffrage articles about Austen and responds to the question of why this history has been untouched in Austen studies. It then turns to current conversations on Austen’s raced and imperial legacy to show how contemporary writers are similarly re-reading Austen for con­temporary audiences. Beyond Austen studies and suffrage history, the essay more broadly contributes to on-going discussions about how and why academics might “undiscipline” nineteenth-century studies. It shows that in order to circumvent gendered, classed, and raced barriers embedded in academic criticism, reception studies must broaden the type of sources considered within any author’s historical reception.

Christina Henderson Harner, Augusta University
Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 65-90

This article examines the ways in which telegraph fiction by women authors imagined heroines whose jobs allowed them to subvert gender norms and take control of their lives. This fiction simultaneously challenged the assumptions of male writers about women telegraph operators and rewrote the genre conventions of sentimental fiction. Writers such as Lida A. Churchill and Ella Cheever Thayer represented the telegraph office as a site of professional and personal development in which disembodied communica­tion over the telegraph uniquely transcended divisions of gender, space, and social sphere. This essay will discuss three areas in which telegraph work benefited women: financial independence, greater romantic freedom, and increased peer community support. It argues that this long-overlooked microgenre of fiction is significant from both a literary and histori­cal perspective.

Christina J. Lambert, Baylor University
Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 45-63

This article examines The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a slave narrative written in the 1850s and attributed to Hannah Crafts, from an ecofeminist perspective to explore the relationship between the human and nonhuman in the text. Drawing upon the growing field of African American environmental criticism, it analyzes the ways in which language reveals sympathy between the narrator and the nonhuman world in their mutual oppression while also challenging the dehumanizing effects of this link. In this reading, the much-criticized final scene describing Hannah’s home becomes the means for Hannah to express her agency and personhood, symbolizing her distinction from the “wildness” that men have used to exploit her and other marginalized women in the text. Ultimately, Hannah’s expression of justice comes in the form of a house. Analyzing The Bondwoman’s Narrative in light of a contemporary lens like ecofeminism reinterprets the text’s ending but also contributes an essential perspective to ecofeminism, illustrating the need to diversify the textual analyses that underpin theoretical lenses.

Kathleen Lubey, St. John’s University
Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 11-44

Reclaiming Hester Piozzi from mischaracterization as failed author and Johnson devotee, this essay argues that she enacted a feminist approach to history in her copious manuscript annotations to The Spectator, the popular and widely read eigh­teenth-century periodical. Inscribing her copy eight decades after the series’ initial appear­ance, Piozzi challenges its normative vision of culture by inserting thick, candid details about her experiences of courtship and marriage. She resists the essays’ sanguine accounts of heterosexuality’s coextensiveness with polite English culture, narrating reproductive domesticity as harmful to women and arguing for social and legal measures to ensure their self-determination. Unfolding piecemeal across the eight-volume set, and echoing claims made about her life in other manuscript fragments, her Spectator marginalia prove the revered printed work to be provisional, its pages and ideas susceptible to revision by an energized interlocutor prepared to change the scope of history. This essay proposes that her method of self-citation is an assemblage of what Sara Ahmed calls “feminist materials”—a body of knowledge derived from gendered experience and unapologetic about the distur­bance it causes to dominant cultural narratives.