Final exam on literature

general social issues such as the importance of responsible leadership in Ireland (e. g. in Maria Edgeworth’s novels The Absentee, 1812, and Ormond, 1817) or the living and working conditions of the urban labouring classes (e. g. in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, 1855).As literary production, so literary criticism was also for centuries dominated by men who had a virtual monopoly over the necessary education and intellectual authority. This did not always help the recognition of female talent: double standards were often applied to measure men’s and women’s literary output as they were to measure their sexual behaviour. As Charlotte Brontë explained in retrospect, she and her sisters chose to ‘veil’ their identities under the ambiguous names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell because ‘without at the time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.’ Similar considerations induced Mary Anne (or Marian) Evans (1819-80) to publish her first fiction under the male pseudonym George Eliot, and contemporary critical opinions that the author may be an elderly clergyman only served to strengthen her resolution to use the same name for all her subsequent novels.