On the vexing history of assessing women’s literary achievements.
How do we measure women’s literary achievements? Today, the question is an uncomfortable one, carrying as it does the suggestion that critical assessments of poetry and fiction work on the model of a yardstick. But as Katherine Angel reveals in a recent LARB essay, some of our most well respected literary institutions do, in fact, operate by taking the measure of women writers, through sometimes oblique editorial practices that tend to shore up existing gender disparities. As she puts it, “one need only look at the pages of our literary magazines to see that women’s writing has a wholly different status culturally—Alice Munro, Hilary Mantel, Eleanor Catton notwithstanding. Our idea of serious, intellectual writing appears to be overwhelmingly male.”
The question of how to assess women’s literary abilities was a vexed one in the eighteenth century as well. In the 1790s in particular, as British women writers were publishing in greater numbers than ever before but struggling to establish lasting literary reputations, two periodicals offered up their own idiosyncratic methods of assessing women’s literary abilities. On April 2, 1792, slotted between a theatrical review and a note about some particularly luscious hothouse peas served at a royal dinner, a newspaper called the Star printed the "Scale of the Female Genius of this Country in the Year MDCCXCII”:
The Star was partly owned by William Lane, founder of Minerva Press, and a leading purveyor of popular fiction. As a result, the paper regularly puffed the works and reputations of favored women writers. The “Scale of the Female Genius,” however, was unlike the fulsome advertisements that typically appeared in the Star’s pages. Looked at today, the scale seems nothing so much as a bizarre rubric aimed at assessing the achievements of fifteen quite different authors, ranked numerically across seven vague and sometimes saccharine categories. These categories—Language, Novelty, Humour, Sentiment, Tenderness, Strength, and Expression—defy the conventional standards of literary merit against which male writers were often measured, indicating the different, gendered range of meanings genius took on in the commercial marketplace.
Case in point, two weeks prior to the appearance of the “Scale of the Female Genius” the Star editorialized a male-oriented “Scale of Genius” (genius here requiring no gendered qualifier). This roster throws into sharp relief the gendered nature of the scales, and the inherent diminishment of women’s literary accomplishments and intellectual capacities. While the “Scale of Female Genius” shares five criteria with its predecessor, Sentiment and Tenderness are substituted in place of the putatively male qualities of Wit and Learning:
The scales purport to offer a disinterested ranking of men and women’s literary abilities, as though genius could be ascertained through careful scorekeeping and arithmetic. More aptly, these charts cabal together a motley set of criteria that reveal how female genius wasn’t quite the same thing as genius. Indeed, it measures out female genius in diminished and explicitly gendered terms that bear little resemblance to popular notions of it, such as those described in such influential works as Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), which had associated genius with an innate capacity for originality and creativity.
Another scale has recently surfaced which appears to have been adapted from those printed in the Star. Discovered by Jennie Batchelor in the course of her research, this scale appeared in the Lady’s Magazine in June 1792, right on the heels of those that ran in the Star. While it ranks a somewhat different group of writers according to slightly different criteria, it also assumes that women’s literary ability can be measured out in sentimental descriptors like Harmony and Feeling.
REF eighteenth-century/Lady's Magazine style via @ladysmagproject pic.twitter.com/HytOeGKGFx
— Jennie Batchelor (@jenniebatchelor) December 16, 2014
There are, however, important differences between the scales. Notably, the scale in the Lady’s Magazine is preceded by a statement disavowing any claim to precisely assess female literary achievement:
We insert the following as we received it from an anonymous correspondent; we approve it in general, but are not to be considered as responsible for every particular estimate.
The “Scale of Female Literary Merit” also arrives at quite different rankings than its predecessor, awarding Mary Robinson the highest score and reserving last place for Lady Craven. But the most significant shift is in the titles, particularly the substitution of “merit” for “genius.” The scale in the Lady’s Magazine may stand as further evidence for the short-lived notion of female genius, which emerged in magazines and newspapers in the early 1790s as a marketing device used to burnish literary reputations and sell books. But for the women writers who (briefly) profited through their association with genius, the hazards of establishing literary reputations through papers like the Star—papers that served as publicity machines for booksellers—quickly became apparent. Such reputations could hardly endure, given the ephemeral nature of periodicals and the obviously self-interested nature of their literary appraisals.
From our latter-day perspective, the scales published by the Star and the Lady’s Magazine are more than fascinating archival discoveries. Though neither scale captures what I find most irresistible about these writers and their works—their daring, their ability to surprise, and their refusal of modern assumptions—they do suggest the vagaries of eighteenth-century efforts to rank women’s literary achievements. And to notice the scales’ resolutely quantitative and utterly arbitrary approach to female literary talent is, I think, to give us pause over our rather more clandestine methods for assessing women’s literary achievements today.
Melissa Sodeman is Associate Professor of English at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and author of Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History.
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