Feminist Re-Visionings: Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Classics

Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the French Academy in 1980, was not officially chosen as a representative of her sex. Consider Jean d’Ormesson’s reply to her Reception speech: “I will not hide from you, Madam, that it is not because you are a woman that you are here today: it is because you are a great writer”. Classical antiquity nourishes the work of Yourcenar, who learned Greek and Latin from private tutors as a child.

Laura (Riding) Jackson was one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, and an influential critic in her time. She wrote extensively on what it means to live and write as a woman. But much of her ground-breaking work is overshadowed by the fact that she lived for some years with Robert Graves, and is thought of by many as the inspiration for his White Goddess.

In 1971, Adrienne Rich – one of the most influential feminist poets of the twentieth century – wrote the essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (On Lies, Secrets and Silence pp. 39–64). It was a powerful call to a re-visioning of the past, and an emphatic statement of the importance of such an endeavour for women: “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entertaining an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter of cultural history: it is an act of survival” (Charlesworth Gelpi and Gelpi 1993: 167).

Edith Wharton’s most notable writing belongs to a period of transition between two eras dominated by classicism, the Victorian period and Modernism. For nineteenth-century women with literary ambitions, authorship and classical education had been closely connected.

The Scottish author and activist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) was a prolific writer in many genres, including historical fiction and science fiction (of which she is often identified as the first female practitioner), and a committed advocate for socialist, feminist, and anti-colonialist causes.