Final exam on literature

subject matter as to what aspects of life they were supposed to portray or even be aware of. Many critics of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), unaided by the gender-ambiguous pen names of Acton and Ellis Bell under which the novels were published, were unwilling to suppose that such scenes of brutal violence as depicted in these novels could have been even familiar to ‘lady’ writers. A few years later, Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Ruth (1853), dealing with the social neglect and injustice involved in the tragic story of an unmarried mother, was banned as dangerous by her husband from her own house and symbolically burned by some of her male acquaintances.

In addition to limitations of schooling and socially acceptable experience, women authors often also had to labour under