Centering the Margins

In January 1845, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in a letter to Henry Chorley: ‘l look everywhere for grandmothers and see none,’ bemoaning the absence of antecedent women poets. Much later, in 1978, in her presentation ‘Toward a Feminist Poetics’, at the University of Oxford, Elaine Showalter emphasized the necessity of discovering and foregrounding women’s writings with a view to rupturing ostensible silences and establishing a continuity of tradition of women’s writings. Absence or paucity of women’s voices, or silences on their part are common across languages, literatures and cultures. Various reasons ranging from lack of proper education to the inability to find publishers could be attributed to these. Besides, at times they wrote in the confessional mode, only to unburden themselves and deliberately guarded against publication, or they wrote for private circulation only, choosing to keep their writings concealed from the public eye or ear; if they did publish, they preferred to do so anonymously or under assumed names. At other times, they were deliberately silenced, or their writings were simply destroyed.