photography by Sabin Gratz '98
Women's worlds
A conversation with professors Robyn Warhol-Down, Mary Lou Kete, and Lisa Schnell, editors of an innovative new anthology of women's writing
The project’s scope was staggering: anthologize seven centuries of women’s writing in English—from poems to diaries, novels to lyrics—and include hundreds of pages of original introductions, essays, and footnotes. Eight years in the making, the recently published Women’s Worlds: The McGraw-Hill Anthology of Women’s Writing was a shared effort among UVM English professors Robyn Warhol-Down, Mary Lou Kete ’86, and Lisa Schnell, and three colleagues at other schools. Where previous anthologies have focused on canonical texts—the staples of the college English classroom—and supplemented with works by global writers and women of color, Women’s Worlds strives to go beyond that model and truly redraw the landscape of women’s writing. Kete, Schnell, and Warhol-Down recently sat down with one of their former students, Amanda Waite ’02 G’04 of Vermont Quarterly, to talk about women’s writing and their new anthology.
VQ: How did this project begin?
Warhol-Down: An acquisitions editor at McGraw-Hill, where I had published before, came to me in 1999 and said, “McGraw-Hill wants the women’s literature book that will knock the Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar anthology published by Norton (long the standard) out of the market. We want to be the competition—there’s no book that is.” She also knew Lisa and liked working with her. So she asked me if I could put a team together that could cover the ground of all women’s writing. Also, could I come up with a really distinctive approach that would really be different enough from the Norton so we could say, “OK, this is the thing to use instead.” So I went to Mary Lou, because she’s the idea person. We brainstormed: “What does the Norton anthology not do that a better book would do?”
Kete: So when Robyn came to me, I said, “But I don’t use anthologies. I’ll only do it if it could be an anthology that I could actually use.” Then what we came up with was what I considered an outrageous—
Warhol-Down: It was radical.
Kete: Very radical.
Warhol-Down: Why was it radical? The book has many, many more women who are writing in English around the world: in Africa, in India, in Sri Lanka, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Scotland. It’s much more global. The traditional anthology always places the white British and American woman at the center and has other authors as supplements on the margins, but we wanted it to be a better picture of what the English speaking world actually is.
Schnell: In the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, women are writing in English in England and a little bit in America. But, by the time you get even to the end of the eighteenth century, that’s really branched out with colonialism. This book gives you those global angles and voices. That’s what really distinguishes this anthology, I think, especially for faculty teaching nineteenth- and twentieth-century stuff. So I’m really proud of that. I hope it gives the Norton a good run for its money.
VQ: Tell me about the approach you used, the critical assumptions you were making as you organized the book.
Kete: We wanted to focus on cultural studies (the critical theory that examines its subject in light of the political, economic, and cultural conditions in which it was created). These are all women writing under material conditions. Throughout the anthology we have these sections called “Cultural Coordinates” where we often consider very material factors that women during a particular time might be dealing with. Like their underwear. (The group laughs.) No, seriously. Robyn has a great question that she asks: “Why do heroines faint?”
Warhol-Down: Yeah, that’s the name of it. Why do heroines faint all the time, like in Charlotte Temple?
Kete: And it’s on corsets. Because they can’t breathe!
Warhol-Down: Because we, ourselves, work in cultural studies perspectives on our research; this is what we’ve always brought to our classrooms when we’re teaching women’s literature. I always talk about clothes, for example. So, the idea with this anthology is to include the insights of cultural studies that many faculty are bringing into their classrooms. Let’s give them some material to work with on that.
VQ: How does the cultural materialist approach affect the organization of the anthology?
Warhol-Down: The way that most anthologies are organized is by literary history. Usually it makes reference to literary periodization, by genres and themes, and by governmental politics. For some reason it’s always about who was the king. For some periods that makes sense because that’s what the literature is about. But not always—and not for all writers. We very self-consciously break it up by centuries rather than literary period or tradition.
Schnell: You can’t posit a tradition with women writers in the period I was writing about (the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries) in the way that the Norton does with the nineteenth century. You simply can’t do that. There are ways those women are functioning in culture as writers, but it’s not a women’s writing tradition. In fact, there are very few openings for women to forge communities in the period, especially since so many of the voices we have from the period are from women of the upper classes, since that’s what survived. There are built-in ways within gentry and noble culture that women are meant to be isolated. There’s not an opportunity to see them the way we might see Milton as borrowing all this classical stuff and really understanding himself as a poet. Some of those women want to understand themselves as poets, but there’s not a lot of opportunity for them to fully imagine that context. So for me, the cultural materialism approach always made sense, especially with the women writers. That’s been my approach with them from the beginning, and more and more so as I’ve spent time with them.
Kete: We tried not to make assumptions also that the major political events are not important. Because they are important. And the conventional literary movements—those are also explained. We used the introductions we wrote to kind of show the interplay between those major periods—periods which have been developed to describe what certain men authors are doing—and what the relationship is between the women writers who are all writing from different positions. So it was kind of complicated.
Warhol-Down: It was complicated. It was very hard to write. But I think that it came out really well. In fact, I really think that they’re groundbreaking in that they’re telling a different story.
Schnell: The introductions are different than the intros in Norton. They just stress very different things. If you read my intro, and then you read the intro to the early modern lit part of the Norton, they don’t say the same thing at all. It’s the same material, and it’s not like one of us is wrong, it’s just they’re coming from two completely different places.
VQ: In a project of this size, how do you begin to decide what to include?
Schnell: You have to walk this balance between using enough of what’s already widely anthologized. And it’s not just the Norton. For me, it’s what’s been anthologized in the early modern anthologies. So what are people used to teaching? And where can you start moving some extra stuff in? Where are your openings? One of the things we definitely wanted to do was expand that fourteenth through seventeenth centuries section. So I had a lot more pages than, say, the Norton had.
Warhol-Down: We have literary and cultural criticism as well, so it’s not just poetry, fiction, and drama. And we also have some other weird things in there. The favorite thing that I included was The Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton from the middle of the nineteenth century. I’ve got recipes in there and advice on how to handle servants. I mean, it’s an amazing thing. And we have a lot of song lyrics. Diane (Price Herndl, a co-editor from Iowa State University) did a section of blues lyrics, and I did one on nineteenth-century hymns that were written by women. So we were very interested both in broadening the definition of what “women” means and in broadening what “writing” means. And we have a piece of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home in there. As far as I know, we’re the only literature anthology that has a piece of graphic narrative in it so far.
VQ: What about excerpting? How do you decide which parts of longer works to include?
Schnell: I excerpted diaries. I really wanted to get a lot of women’s life voices in, especially because we had this cultural bias in the anthology. That’s how you sort of climb in and find out about women’s lives. You know, when we read Ann Clifford’s diary from 1616 in my class every year, my students always talk about how formal it is. It’s a diary, but she’s really formal. She’s not letting it all hang out. A lot of these women are aristocrats. So there’s this whole decorum; you’re not getting quite under the surface. But every once in a while, one of them will just break out. Especially these young girls who are sixteen, and their dad won’t let them marry the guy they want to marry. And there’s incredible drama. He’s coming to the door in the middle of the night to see her, but the servant thinks he’s an intruder and nearly kills him. Then he’s lying on the ground bleeding, and she’s screaming. I really wanted to get that stuff in. I would just try to choose the bits that I thought got the deepest into their lives. That was one of my major foci of the whole section: I really wanted to get their real voices in there. Who were they? What kind of lives were they living?
VQ: What did you learn while doing this project?
Warhol-Down: I never realized before I did this, and certainly not in my experience of doing anthologies before, that a textbook can be a scholarly endeavor. That was because we had so much feedback from other teachers and scholars and because the anthology was vetted the way that a piece of scholarship is. It’s not like what people think when they think, “Oh, they just did a text book.”
(for UVM staff)