ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on six different strategies employed by women writers when attempting to imagine a place for women in the past: male ventriloquism, counter-history, tales of suffering, exceptionalism, female utopia, and deconstructing gender. In historical novels, women risk not only being silenced and marginalized, but also exploited and oppressed. Diana Wallace coined the phrase "male ventriloquism" to describe a particular strategy she noticed in women's historical fiction: "In cross-writing about/as men, women writers can be seen as engaged in the act of ventriloquism, adopting a male voice through the use of a male protagonist or first-person narrator". A woman writer may be given credit for destroying the genre, but not for having originated it. The woman's line, the gynaeology, is marked by the common elements of their first names; each generation builds upon the next and also retains the legacy: Anna, Hanna, and Johanna.
