The mission of Mary Eliza Haweis (1848-1898)

This thesis reclaims the author and illustrator Mary Eliza Haweis and is the first study to bring together the various facets of her career including published literature, unpublished writings, and memoranda. The current presentation of Haweis in scholarship is one-dimensional – Haweis is a connoisseur of women’s fashion, a female aesthete. Her other literary outputs, mentioned anecdotally, tie her casually to the Suffrage movement. The first aim of this thesis is to fill the gap in the current understanding of this under-researched woman writer. Secondly, this thesis will showcase a way to recover marginalised women writers that reads across modes and which challenges binaries, including the categories of feminist and anti-feminist.

Haweis’ mission – the empowerment of women - is like a mosaic. It is made up of many pieces, sometimes fragmentary, and this thesis encapsulates a range of the writer’s works to produce a rich, comprehensive work of recovery. Haweis’ writings, which span 1848 to 1898, cover both the domestic and political lives of women in the nineteenth century. She wrote of dress, furniture, housekeeping, unionising, the right to vote, and divorce. Haweis’ works present seemingly conflicting ideas, some traditional and others progressive, and it is this which is significant to the scholarship of marginalised women writers. The academic work on recovering such women writers is extensive, yet it has been criticised for “producing reductive versions of their oeuvres, which highlight politically pleasing utterances and gloss over the rest” (Schaffer 11). This study starts at the end of Haweis’ career with the last work published in her lifetime, her “politically pleasing” novel A Flame of Fire (1897), and then works backwards to tease out a complex presentation of Haweis. This thesis ultimately demonstrates how Haweis and her works challenge, thwart, and expand upon the existing categories in feminism and women’s writing.