Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing

As the title suggests, Bearing the Word looks with particular intensity at the intersections of women’s reproductive and literary roles. Through close readings of works by Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Homans explores the variety of ways in which nineteenth-century women writers attempted to reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing. In so doing, Homans responds to questions raised by contradictory assumptions in current feminist theory.