- to echo oursin's line. I'm glad Kathryn Hughes has written this article in response to Elaine Showalter, because when I first saw Showalter's theory on the absence of great 19th-cetury american women novelists, I was convinced things weren't as simple as that. Basically Showalter asked why no American Brontes or Eliots and concluded that it had to do with British women having more servants and less housework to do:

"While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the south, white women in slave-holding families were trained in domestic arts."

As Hughes points out, it's really misleading to suppose British middle-class women like the Brontes were sitting on their hands all day just because they kept the odd maid (as did their US equivalents, anyway). In fact "the mistress of the middle-class household was most likely to be cooking and cleaning alongside her servants. In the days before vacuum cleaners, washing machines and fridges, the daily battle against soot, bedbugs, candle grease and mouldy food was one that lasted pretty much all day and required every hand on deck.".

This, though, does leave the original question: where were the American Brontes? And there probably isn't one simple answer, but two possibilities do occur. First, there hadn't been much time to build up a tradition of women's writing in America (and what there was seems to have been poetry). The Brontes, Eliot, even Austen, did have both fellow women writers and precursors, maybe not many but enough to provide a bit of vital I-can-do-this encouragement.

The other thought is that since the likes of Austen, Eliot and the Brontes couldn't hope to get paid a lot for their work, however much they might have liked to, they could at least write more or less what they wanted. Austen in particular got peanuts. There were 19th-century American women novelists; Stowe and Alcott come to mind, but they were writing neither for themselves nor for posterity. Stowe was writing for a cause, so aiming for maximum sales and publicity. And Alcott. like her heroine Jo, was writing for money, so had to do the same. I don't know what the relative markets were like at that time (other than that the US wouldn't recognise foreign copyright). Was it the case that a writer, even a woman writer, stood a better chance of actually making a living by writing in America? If that were so, it might at least partly explain writers aiming at a market that may simply have been less available in the UK. I guess the likes of Mrs Radcliff made more in the UK than the Austens and Brontes, but AFAIK, even she wasn't actually financially dependent on writing. Anthony Trollope's mum did make a living with her pen, but she was a travel writer, I think?

Interesting.