ABSTRACT
Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic demonstrates that there were more pen-wielding muses out there than one tends to give women credit for, and this book recovers a viable, though largely neglected, minor tradition in literary history. For millennia, women have been considered fit only to play the role of passive muses, as catalysts and helpers of the male poetic genius. It is appropriate to link Pygmalion's creation of the statue with his male womb-envy, and to associate artistic production with sexual conception and birth. The same goes for the symbolical androgyny implied in the very concept of "muses with pens", which is, in fact, meant as an oblique homage to Virginia Woolf. It appears that female enthusiasm for the epic abated during the Victorian era, as restrictive domestic gender ideologies and a consolidated market for female novels and lyrics lessened the attraction for women to experiment with this august genre.
