Women in the Literary Marketplace

Education

In the nineteenth century, English society assumed women to be intellectually inferior to men, and that too much education would "ruin" girls, making them unfit for marriage and motherhood. Consequently, most middle and upper middle class girls were taught little beyond basic reading and writing, and instead were trained in "accomplishments," such as music, drawing, and dancing, to better attract eligible suitors.

Yet women who hoped to have their writing taken seriously in the same arena with men’s needed to attain a comparable level of education–education that was all but closed to them for most of the century.