Greatness Engendered

Alison Booth is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Director of the Scholars' Lab at the University of Virginia Library. She is the author of How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, winner of the Barbara Penny Kanner Award.

Booth successfully demonstrates how Eliot and Woolf challenged gender prescriptions by the very act of writing history as well as by the kind of history they wrote. She is careful to point out that Eliot and Woolf were not the first to shift the focus of history to common life, but she persuasively argues that they pushed it further by explicitly addressing what patriarchal discourses had silenced or obscured: the issue of gender and historical interpretation.- Suzanne Graver (Modern Philology) Greatness Engendered takes its place appropriately in Cornell's Reading Women Writing series. It provides a useful examination of how two major authors both read and wrote the problem of greatness.- Caroline Webb (South Atlantic Review)