When literary periods are defined on the basis of men’s writing,
women’s writing must be forcibly assimilated into an irrelevant grid: a
Renaissance that is not a renaissance for women, a Romantic period in which
women played very little part, a modernism with which women conflict.
Simultaneously, the history of women’s writing has been suppressed, leaving
large, mysterious gaps in accounts of the development of various genres.
Feminist criticism is beginning to correct this situation. Margaret Anne
Doody, for example, suggests that during "the period between
the death of Richardson and the appearance of the novels of Scott and Austen,"
which has "been regarded as a dead period," late- eighteenth-century women
writers actually developed "the paradigm for women’s fiction of the nineteenth
century—something hardly less than the paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel
itself." Feminist critics have also pointed out that the twentieth-century
writer Virginia Woolf belonged to a tradition other than modernism and that this
tradition surfaces in her work precisely where criticism has hitherto found
obscurities, evasions, implausibilities, and imperfections. The
author quotes Doody most probably in order to illustrate
A. a contribution that feminist criticism can make to literary
criticism.
B. a modernist approach that conflicts with women’s writing.
C. writing by a woman which had previously been ignored.
D. the hitherto overlooked significance of Scott’s and Austen’s
novels.
E. a standard system of defining literary periods.