ABSTRACT

Jane Williams and Julia Kavanagh produced histories of women's writing, Williams offering an overview of English women's literary output from the earliest times to 1700 and of their poetry up to 1850, and Kavanagh treating the tradition of fiction-writing established by women in both France and England, up to Jane Austen and beyond. Hannah Lawrance, in her histories of women from the medieval and earlier periods, was not concerned primarily with their literary achievements, but the ideas developed therein inform the two substantial articles she later wrote on Charlotte Bront and Elizabeth Barrett Browning respectively. Like more recent historians of women, Lawrance, Williams and Kavanagh saw themselves as rescuing notable women from oblivion, neglect or misrepresentation. In describing convent education for women, Lawrance assures her nineteenth-century readers that, although the female students had the same literary instruction as the male, they also learned, and learned to respect, the duties and occupations of women.