"Dangerously Brainy" Women and their Male Editors (thesis)

Abstract

The decision to write on Anne Bradstreet, Mary Shelley, and Sylvia Plath cannot be abstracted from their gender. In the beginning of my thesis process, I was captivated by the question of how male editors affect the works of the women they edit. This led to a series of questions: Do these male editors alter texts significantly from the female writers’ original purpose? What do they remove, what do they emphasize, can these choices be seen as affected by gender? And when I narrowed my interest to women who are edited by the men close to them—how does the marital or familial connection between the writer and editor affect those choices? And finally, how do literary scholars more specifically and academic audiences more generally receive, interpret, and acknowledge the writing of women after it had been edited by men? I selected Anne Bradstreet, Mary Shelley, and Sylvia Plath as the subjects of my research because of two criteria. Firstly, because they each had close familial relationships with their male editors. Secondly, because each of their biographies possessed something unique, striking, or sensational which has previously been used to reduce these women to their biography, removing focus and attention from the quality of their work. [From Introduction]