Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies by Natalie Wright

Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies sheds new light on the history of the academic discipline of English. It is the first book to study women scholars collectively during what proved to be a transformational period for the study and teaching of literature, as universities across England began offering courses in English for the first time. Looking at the lives and work of three pioneering women – Q. D. Leavis, Caroline Spurgeon, and Edith Morley – it explores their critical tendencies along with the role of gender within English studies’ inaugural methods and values.

Combining textual analysis and extensive archival research, Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies unveils important findings about how Leavis, Spurgeon, and Morley approached their work, often against the grain of their discipline: studying the novel before many of their contemporaries, investigating writers’ personal and material conditions, using statistical methods, and writing about women’s lives, emotions, education, and literary endeavours. In the period in which English Studies was increasingly shaped by the method of practical criticism devised by I. A. Richards at Cambridge in the 1920s, the book argues that these three women operated instead as pragmatic critics – acutely aware as women of their own material and political constraints and reading the work of others within theirs.

Women and the Rise of Academic English Studies makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how the discipline evolved in England during the early twentieth century and offers insights to anyone interested in the history of higher education, the intellectual professions, and women’s political movements. Literary culture and university life are brought into new focus through the eyes of three women who dared to professionally venture their opinions about books.