1st Edition
Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies Pragmatic Criticism
Chapter 1: Introduction: Gender and English Studies
Entering the Ivory Tower
Pragmatic Criticism
Three Pioneers
Approach and Structure
Chapter 2: Rogue Professionals: Women Working in English Departments
The Professionalisation of Literary Criticism
Edith Morley as Rogue Professor
A Soft Option?
Q. D. Leavis and the One Great Profession of Marriage
Teaching as Doubled Feminisation
Chapter 3: Assays of Bias: Women’s Literary Statistics
Objective Criteria
A Personal Count in Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935)
Political Auto-ethnography in Edith Morley’s Women Workers in Seven Professions (1914)
Literary Anthropology in Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public (1932)
Partial Objectivity
Chapter 4: The Room Behind the Mind: Queer Collegiate Reading
Women in College
The Room as Witness in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ (1926)
Crypto-lesbian Affections in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935)
Q. D. Leavis and Academic Literary Taste
Caroline Spurgeon’s Intellectual Hospitality
A Place That Alters All One’s Values
Chapter 5: Miracles and Classics: Women Reading the Novel
Raising Novels to the Level of Art
The Half-forgotten Sentimental Novel
Caroline Spurgeon, Q. D. Leavis, and the Miracle of Jane Austen
Trained to Reproduce
Q. D. Leavis and the Novelistic Tradition
More than a Classic
Chapter 6: 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
