Final exam on literature

education and experience have influenced the lives and works of women authors as well. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) famously described successful playwright and novelist (and thus his literary rival) Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) as if her writing proceeded not from an educated and well-regulated mind (like his own) but the ignorance and dull animality of a woman with “cow-like udders and with ox-like eyes”. Several decades later, Jane Austen (1775-1817), who spent less than two years in a school for young women (while two of her brothers went to Oxford), was ironically playing with the well-established image of the ignorant female “scribbler” when she rejected advice on what books she should write. Lack of a solid classical education, she suggested, deprived her of proper knowledge of “science and philosophy” as well the “quotations and allusions” that were the privilege of masculine erudition. As certain genres were more dependent on a formal education than others,