As a student straight out of high school, I believed Law and Literature to be chalk and cheese and was perturbed for having to choose between the two streams as a career to pursue. Little did I know that they were, indisputably, chalk and duster or cheese and bread!
Each day spent in law school and subsequently, in the courtrooms has been reminding me how both discourses are indispensable and are nothing but an interaction between culture and society.
We all would recall that when Charlotte Brontë sent a selection of her poems to a fellow male poet for comments, ten years before the publication of Jane Eyre (1847), she was advised against the notion of women pursuing a career in literature. The comment she received stands quoted as “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation."
Writing fiction for money was considered an unladylike activity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘Sense and Sensibility’ which was the first published novel by Jane Austen in 1811, was published with the tag ‘By a Lady’. Among other female writers who also published their novels anonymously or under male pseudonyms, are Louisa May Alcott, Mary Shelley, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe, and even JK Rowling.