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DAE notice people calling every female author from the 1800s a "proto-feminist" without really reading their work?
I'm in 3 book clubs and we just finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. Everyone kept praising it as this radical feminist manifesto but Anne herself said she wrote it to show the dangers of alcoholism. Her sister Charlotte even blocked a reprint because she thought it was too harsh on men. I checked the letters Bronte wrote to her publisher and she never once used the word feminist or women's rights. Has anyone else dealt with modern readers forcing labels onto old books that the authors themselves would have rejected?
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matthewg632mo ago
she wrote it to show the dangers of alcoholism" - you're right she said that, but I think you're looking at it too narrow. Anne Bronte lived in a world where women couldn't get divorced or keep their kids or own property. She literally wrote a story about a woman who escapes an abusive marriage by running away and supporting herself through painting. That was basically unheard of then. The alcoholism stuff is just the surface. Its like saying Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick just to teach people about whaling. Yeah right. A book can be about multiple things at once without the author spelling it out in letters. The characters actions speak louder than what the author told her publisher in a business letter.
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