English 4622, The Somerville Novelists

The Somerville Novelists

"Probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions." -- Vera Brittain

"Have not the daughters of educated men ... paid with their own education for Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and all the great schools and universities on the continent…? Have they not paid so generously and lavishly if so indirectly, that when at last, in the nineteenth century, they won the right to some paid-for education for themselves, there was not a single woman who had received enough paid-for education to be able to teach them?" -- Virginia Woolf

"When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans." -- Vera Brittain

Timeline of Women's Suffrage:

• 1897 NUWSS formed
• 1903 WSPU
• 1918 women over 30 get right to vote
• 1928 franchise extended to all women over 21

"I found it the most enthralling adventure–to enter, even at second-hand, that world of purely aesthetic and intellectual interests, was to me as strange an exploration as it would have been for Virginia Woolf to sit beside my mother’s pie and hear my uncles talk fat-stock prices and cub-hunting." -- Winifred Holtby

Principles and Problems of Modernism:

• Modern Fiction
• Highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow

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Class Start-Ups

• 2 pointed questions
• 2 provocative passages

Collaborative Wiki Project

Individual Reading Project

• Wiki Page
• Pecha Kucha Presentation

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MODERNISM

SUFFRAGE

I have myself been heckled as an agitator at Marble Arch, demanding the vote in the equal franchise campaign of 1927 and 1928; and I have been enfranchised. I have voted. And I know that those people who say that the world is no better off since ‘women have been let loose in it’ simply do not know what they are talking about. -- Winifred Holtby

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ENGLISH 4622

The Somerville Novelists

Dr. R. Maitzen

Fall 2012

MWF 2:30-3:30

Our writers:

What else?

Welcome to curiosity-driven research!

Vera Brittain

Winifred Holtby

Margaret Kennedy

Dorothy L. Sayers

OXFORD

Timeline of WWI:

• July 28 1914: assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo
• triggered reactions across alliances
• Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) vs. Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain)
• first use of poison gas at Ypres in 1915
• Battle of the Somme (over 600,000 Allied casualties)
• May 1917: U.S. enters war
• November 11, 1918: Armistice
• Deaths:
• British: 740,000
• French: 1.4million
• German: 1.8 million
• 1/3 of Oxford class of 1913

Timeline of Women at Oxford:

• 1849: Bedford College, London established
• 1873: Ladies' Lecture Series begins at Oxford
• 1876: founding of Somerville College and Lady Margaret Hall
• 1884: 'Hons Mods' opened to women
• 1894: all exams for B.A. open to women
• 1920: women admitted to degrees

THE GREAT WAR

English 4622: Course Components

Required Readings

• Testament of Youth
• South Riding
• Gaudy Night
• The Constant Nymph
• Selected excerpts and essays

LOGISTICS:

Our Books