Study smarter with Fiveable
Get study guides, practice questions, and cheatsheets for all your subjects. Join 500,000+ students with a 96% pass rate.
British Literature II traces how women writers fought for voice, visibility, and artistic authority across two centuries. You're being tested on more than biographical facts—exams want you to understand how these authors challenged literary conventions, pioneered new narrative techniques, and interrogated the social structures that constrained women's lives. The themes that unite them—autonomy, identity, domesticity, madness, and creative freedom—appear repeatedly in FRQ prompts asking you to analyze how gender shapes both form and content.
Don't just memorize titles and dates. Know what each author contributed to the evolution of women's writing: Who invented new narrative techniques? Who challenged genre boundaries? Who wrote explicitly about the conditions necessary for women to create art? When you can connect an author to a specific literary innovation or feminist intervention, you're ready for any exam question they throw at you.
These early 19th-century authors proved that women could master—and transform—the novel form. They worked within domestic settings while subtly subverting expectations about what women could observe, critique, and create.
Compare: Austen vs. Shelley—both wrote in the early 19th century, but Austen perfected realist social comedy while Shelley invented speculative fiction. If an FRQ asks about genre innovation, Shelley is your strongest example; for narrative voice, choose Austen.
The Brontës transformed the novel by infusing it with emotional intensity, wild landscapes, and female protagonists who refuse to be contained. Their Yorkshire setting becomes almost a character itself.
Compare: Charlotte vs. Emily Brontë—both use gothic elements, but Charlotte's Jane Eyre ultimately rewards virtue with domestic happiness, while Emily's Wuthering Heights offers no such resolution. Use this contrast for questions about Victorian values and their limits.
These authors positioned themselves as public intellectuals, using fiction and poetry to diagnose society's ills. They wrote with moral seriousness about the ethical consequences of individual choices within interconnected communities.
Compare: Eliot vs. Browning—both engaged social issues, but Eliot worked through prose fiction's psychological depth while Browning used poetry's concentrated emotional power. For questions about Victorian reform literature, either works; for narrative technique, choose Eliot.
Modernist women writers didn't just tell different stories—they invented new ways of telling. Stream of consciousness, fragmented time, and subjective interiority replaced linear plots and omniscient narration.
Compare: Woolf vs. Austen—both anatomize social worlds, but Austen uses ironic distance while Woolf plunges into interiority. This contrast illustrates the shift from 19th-century realism to modernist subjectivity—a common exam theme.
These authors made the personal explicitly political, drawing on autobiography to expose how society damages women's minds and bodies. Confessional writing refuses the boundary between private suffering and public critique.
Compare: Plath vs. Lessing—both explore women's psychological breakdown, but Plath's compressed poetry intensifies personal anguish while Lessing's sprawling novels connect individual crisis to political structures. Use Plath for close reading questions, Lessing for broader thematic analysis.
Contemporary women writers interrogate what "British" means in a postcolonial, multicultural nation. Their novels insist that immigration, race, and hybrid identity are central—not marginal—to the British literary tradition.
Compare: Smith vs. Eliot—both create panoramic social novels tracing interconnected lives, but Smith's London is defined by immigration and postcolonial complexity rather than Victorian provincial England. This pairing works for questions about how the novel form adapts to new social realities.
| Concept | Best Examples |
|---|---|
| Narrative innovation (voice/structure) | Austen (free indirect discourse), Woolf (stream of consciousness), Lessing (fragmented notebooks) |
| Gothic and supernatural elements | Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë |
| Proto-feminist/feminist argument | Charlotte Brontë, Woolf ("A Room of One's Own"), Browning (Aurora Leigh) |
| Genre invention/transformation | Mary Shelley (science fiction), Plath (confessional poetry) |
| Social reform and moral vision | Eliot, Browning, Lessing |
| Psychological interiority | Woolf, Plath, Eliot |
| Postcolonial/multicultural identity | Lessing, Smith |
| Male pseudonym/institutional barriers | George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell) |
Which two authors pioneered new narrative techniques that broke from omniscient third-person storytelling, and how do their innovations differ?
Compare how Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf each address women's need for independence—what does each identify as the primary obstacle?
If an FRQ asked you to trace the evolution of the "madwoman" figure in British women's writing, which three authors would you discuss and why?
Both Mary Shelley and Zadie Smith write about creation and responsibility, but in vastly different contexts. How might you connect Frankenstein's themes to White Teeth's exploration of cultural inheritance?
Which author would best support an argument about how formal experimentation (not just content) can express feminist ideas? Explain your choice with specific technique.