Women Letter-Writing Under Men's Criticism

In his Caractères, published in 1688, the French neo-classicist Jean de La Bruyère praises women letter-writers for their ability to express their sentiments with a genuine naturalness and effortless delicacy, which their contemporaries who are men could only achieve by means of long brainwork and strenuous searching (“d’un long travail & d’une penible recherche”). In his opinion, some women's letters might even be ranked among the best writings in the French language— if only they wrote always correctly (“Si les femmes étoient toujours correctes”). Although their charming naturalness deserved to be admired, the critic decides that the women's lacking command of the language rules disqualified their writings from entering a serious competition with the men of letters, who merely needed to put some effort into the imitation of women's naivety to not only equal but even surpass them. Similarly, in 1713, Richard Steele's Guardian can tell the women's authorship of a handwritten text immediately by its “peculiar modes in spelling, and a certain negligence in grammar.” Instead of embarrassing the young lady concerned “by exposing her work to public view,” however, he decides to communicate his own thoughts on her alleged “easy” style of writing, thus doing away with the naive opinion that a natural style merely consisted of a thoughtless and immature inartificiality. On the contrary, it demanded “the greatest labour” even of the most talented and accomplished authors. The linguistic faultiness of women's writing seems to have accompanied their natural expression of sentiment for at least another century. In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, completed in 1803, Henry Tilney still mocks women's talent for an “easy style” of letter-writing which distinguished itself by a “general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”

Similar judgments have been passed on early modern German princesses’ letters since the sixteenth century. In order to reconstruct the Courtly Life and Customs of the Princesses in the 16th Century from 1844, the historian Johannes Voigt has analyzed several hundred pieces of women's correspondence. The impression they gave him, however, was rather disappointing. Not only did they continually violate the rules of grammar and orthography, but they also exhibited a most clumsy and awkward style of expression. In fact, the muchpraised “easy” naturalness of women's writing is a phenomenon of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.