Women Writers and the Provincial Novel

Abstract

This chapter is about the ‘spatial turn’ that occurs in literature of the nineteenth century, and the relationship it bears to women’s writing. By ‘spatial turn’, I mean a change of emphasis from texts in which location and environment tend to form a neutral backdrop to action to, in the nineteenth century, texts in which place increasingly plays a decisive role in structuring narratives, and is often a significant element in the thematic substance of the work. The turn is particularly marked in fiction, where the popular success of novels by Walter Scott made it de rigueur for writers to include topographical descriptions, dialect, and other markers of geographical location in their works. Novels came to be admired for their depiction of environments and places that felt somehow real: places which were not only convincingly portrayed, but which also an enthusiastic reader might visit as a tourist, and even inhabit. At the same time, new modalities of place emerged in literature, which provided the basis of a new taxonomy of place-based subgenres such as the regional novel, the provincial novel, or the village tale. 1

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