Searching for Mary Garth: The figure of the writing woman in Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, E. M. Delafield, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner

In my dissertation, I challenge dominant paradigms of female authorship that have tended to construct the woman writer as depressed and embittered, raging and rebellious, by instead investigating the far more problematic relationship women writers have with what has been termed the "conventional": writers whose domestic, religious, and/or romantic concerns have made them a less than perfect fit in a tradition of "radical" women. Taking the figure of Middlemarch's Mary Garth--George Eliot's only portrayal, albeit a brief one, of a writing woman--as emblematic of this different kind of woman writer, I explore how these women authors have themselves theorized the female writer--and the possibilities available to her--within their texts. Mary Garth's characteristics of being self-critical and responsible, of refusing inequality--both financial and verbal--in romantic relationships, of rejecting religious hypocrisy, and most importantly, of writing out of domesticity are the very qualities that unite the writing figures in the texts under consideration in this dissertation. Thus, after surveying the major critical perspectives concerning the woman writer, I examine two nineteenth century writers, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning--both of whom have been criticized for their domesticated, and thus, it is usually argued, unsatisfactory endings. In these chapters, I focus particularly on Bronte's and Barrett Browning's often dismissed or overlooked use of Christianity and religious language as strategies of empowerment and as integral components of their vision of the life of the woman writer. My final chapter traces how three women in the twentieth century employ, defend, and transmute this heritage of conventionality. For E. M. Delafield, Barbara Pym and Anita Brookner, marriage becomes less certain (and in Delafield's case, perhaps even less desirable) and religion more a part of the way in which they negotiate the middle position which they occupy between conventionality and modernity. Yet for all of these women, writing remains the crucial means of deliverance, the key way in which they are able to bring together all the disparate parts of their lives and thereby envision a productive space for themselves, rather than the destructive one which so often has been the only alternative.