“The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English” edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

I like a challenge, and there is something about a 2390-page book that excites me. I got the anthology a few years ago (since moving to Trail Ridge, so within the past 6 years). Of course, the idea was to read it then, but the size and contents were daunting. I thought I would recognize more of the authors and it would be a visit to somewhere familiar, but instead I found the authors I knew were few and far between. I finished Showalter’s “A Jury of Her Peers”  last year, and while I was fascinated by the book, I recognize that my knowledge of women authors is lacking. I am now working on Gilbert/Gubar’s “Madwoman in the Attic,” a literary criticism of Victorian women’s literature. I am hoping that by reading the Anthology I will have a better founding in the literature itself, and the books about the literature, like “Madwoman,” will be even more rewarding.

However, there is no way I could wait until I finished roughly 2400 pages before I wrote about it – I’ll have to write as I go. I have already started with a blog about the poetry by Erica Jong, and I continue to work through the anthology, nonlinearly as is my way, writing as I go.

The first section of the book includes literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There are few authors represented here since there were few women writing at the time. Each section has an introduction to the history, politics and literature of the time, and for this section I found it interesting that Gilbert/Gubar said that women did not experience a Renaissance in the same way that men did. This echos the sentiment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in “Infidel” who said the same thing about Muslims. We are trained to believe in the global nature of the Renaissance, where our “globe” is the Western world, but their lack of envolvement with academic thought isolated women from this phenomenom in the same way that geography isolated others.

Of the authors in this section, I only knew one: Elizabeth I. My knowledge of her comes from Hollywood depictions, where she is represented as having strength and intelligence. From the small samples of writing in the anthology, I see where that comes from. I don’t know enough history to fully understand her poetry, but her speech to the troops at Tilbury and “The Doubt of Future Foes” were powerful.

As mentioned in many blog entries, my background is very traditional and conservative, and so earlier in life when I first discovered that some people characterize God as a woman, I found this idea new and alarming. Since then, I come to understand those images, and embrace them. I was shocked to find that someone wrote of Jesus as a mother figure in the 15th Century as Julian of Norwich did. Of course, there is nothing new under the sun as we age, but on occasion I feel cheated that I wasn’t taught about unconventional views of God. In fact, the more I read and see, I recognize that the image of God and the interpretations of the Bible that I was taught are very modern. That Julian of Norwich had the opportunity to develop, through visions, her own image of God was something my strict religion did not allow, even though she and I shared a religion. That religion was not the same in her era and mine.

In the same way, Amelia Lanier’s “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” [Eve’s Aplogy in Defence of Women] was a revelation as well. That a woman could write her interpretation of the events in the Garden of Eden that differed from modern doctrine was a surprise. In some ways the rights of women have taken long to achieve in the Western world, but in others it seems that we lost ground along the way and could have made more progress. Margery Kempe writes about her difficulties to choose how her body was used by her husband and how she faced temptation, and illustrates the power that men and law had over women at the time, and how difficult it must have been for women who were not willing to bend to the will of society.  (The complete text of "The Book of Margery Kempe" in middle English.)

The writing by the other author in this section, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was incomprehensible to me because of the language used, the structure of the poetry and the subject matter. I gave it a good try, starting over several times, but simply could not understand it, even with the help of good footnotes. I am assuming that the language of all of the writing in this section about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was modernized, but that was not enough in the case of Herbert’s poetry. One poem was a account her husband’s time at court and why he had to leave, an apology of sorts? But I do not know enough about the court and times of Elizabeth I to catch the references.

I am excited about moving forward in the anthology, but at the beginning of the section on the literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries is a lengthy introduction to get through.



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Looking for a title of a poem, I just accessed a table of contents of the Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature that had more literature (and different spelling) than in my copy! What?! It seems the 2-volume 3rd edition has added 61 authors! I checked, and mine is a paperback copy of the first edition of the book. I guess I won’t get the whole experience, but what the hey, 2390 pages v. 2545 pages. I’ll have to check to see what I am missing later and see if I want to read some of the others.