How to suppress women’s writing: “She only wrote one good book.”
In about 1971 I was teaching Charlotte Brontë in a women’s studies course and decided to use her Villette instead of Jane Eyre. The number of different publishers who have in print different paperback editions of Jane Eyre I know not; I found several editions in the bookstore of my university (and one more, a year later, in the “Gothic” section of the local supermarket). But there was not one edition of Villette in print in the United States, whether in paperback or hardcover, and I finally had to order the book (in hardcover, too expensive for class use) from England. (The only university library editions of Villette or Shirley I could find at that time were the old Tauchnitz editions: tiny type and no leading.)
In three women’s studies classes in two separate institutions (1972–1974) I asked my students whether they had read Jane Eyre. About half had, in all three classes. Of these only one young woman (almost all of the students were women) knew that Charlotte Brontë had written any other novel, though a considerable number (looking, they explained, for another “Brontë book”) had happened upon Wuthering Heights. Most of my students who had read Jane Eyre had done so in their early teens and most were vague about exactly how they had come to read it, although most were also very clear that it was not through assigned reading in school. It seems to me that these youngsters, who had somehow “found” Jane Eyre as part of an amorphous culture outside formal education (librarians? friends?) would have gone on to read Shirley and Villette—if the books had been physically available to them. But they were not, and Charlotte Brontë remained to them the author of one book, Jane Eyre. None of them, of course, knew of Emily Brontë’s poems, let alone her Gondal poems.
