ABSTRACT
In The Woman of Genius, Elizabeth B. Lester takes on the question of what form of prose fiction is best for representing a female author with a transcendent imagination, for representing her characteristics, life, and place within her world. Yet The Woman of Genius seems most interested in questioning the value of categorization altogether and the illusory purity on which categories, and the boundaries between them, rely. Through the story of Edith Avondel, The Woman of Genius examines categories for defining not only genre, valuable literature, and gendered writing but also race, nationality and nationhood itself. In a novel about a woman of genius, it is disturbing that it is her husband's success and happiness, rather than her continued artistry from within marriage that is stressed. While masculine and feminine Romanticism might best be viewed as authorial subject positions that both sexes can inhabit through "ideological cross-dressing", they do so with only moderate success.
