ABSTRACT
A society confident of its political stability and public legitimacy will tend to turn its mind to more inward questions of personal identity and private relationships. This is what the Augustans increasingly did: and the position of women naturally came under a good deal of scrutiny. According to Thorstein Veblen, the position of women is the most striking index of the level of cultural attainment a community has reached. Few women had the experience of life which major creative writing presupposes; and fewer still the ambition which is born of independence. One of the obstacles lay in the fact that women were exposed in an especially acute form to the stultifying influences visible at large. It has been argued that women benefited from the fact that 'the stiff upper lip had not yet been built into the character of an English gentleman. Men and women were natural, spontaneous and straightforward.'
