1st Edition
Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies Pragmatic Criticism
1 Introduction: Women, Gender, and English Studies
Entering the Ivory Tower
Pragmatic Criticism
Three Pioneers
Approach and Structure
2 Rogue Professionals: Women Working in English Studies
The Professionalisation of Literary Criticism
A Soft Option?
Edith Morley, Rogue Professor
Q. D. Leavis and the One Great Profession
Teaching as Doubled Feminisation
3 Assays of Bias: Women’s Literary Statistics
Objective Criteria
Caroline Spurgeon’s Personal Count
Edith Morley’s Political Auto-Ethnography
Q. D. Leavis’s Literary Anthropology
Partial Objectivity
4 The Room Behind the Mind: Queer Collegiate Reading
Women in College
Virginia Woolf’s Room as Witness
Dorothy Sayers’s Crypto-Lesbian Affections
Q. D. Leavis and Academic Literary Taste
Caroline Spurgeon’s Hospitality
A Place That Alters All One’s Values
5 The Nature of a Miracle: Women Reading the Novel
Raising Novels to the Level of Art
The Half-Forgotten Sentimental Novel
Caroline Spurgeon and the Miracle of Jane Austen
Trained to Reproduce
Q. D. Leavis and The Great Tradition
More Than a Classic
Conclusion
After the pioneers
Biography
Natalie Wright is an independent researcher specialising in the history of academic English studies, higher education, and women's political movements during the early twentieth century. She was awarded a PhD in English from the University of Sussex in 2020.
"Women’s entry into universities had profound effects on these hitherto masculine communities. Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies considers an important question – how did gender impact on the values and assumptions of academic disciplines? – through the lives and work of three pioneering women scholars."
--Carol Dyhouse, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sussex
"Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies combines archival research with literary criticism to provide a smart and compelling new account of this vital period for the discipline. It is a much-needed re-evaluation, underpinned by meticulous investigative scholarship."
--Alexandra Lawrie, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Edinburgh
