Call for Papers: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Astronomy, and Gender

A special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (Summer 2025) edited by Noah Comet and Gillian Daw  OverviewIn 1808, at age 14, Felicia Hemans ventured into the literary marketplace with a volume simply entitled Poems. The success that would eventually make hers a household name was years away, but her thoughts were already tuned to a region far vaster than the North Wales community she called home. In “To the Moon,” for example, she looked to the cosmos and to classical precedent as she channeled the Greek myth of Selene/Artemis as an archetype of creative power:
Heaven's canopy is studded bright,
With countless stars, in streams of light;
Yet what avail their beams divine,
If thou fair queen, refuse to shine?
The moon’s light is here conjured as an amplifying, organizing, and unifying gift—and one that is granted or withheld by the arbitration of female authority (recalling Charlotte Smith’s Miltonic notion of the moon as a “mute arbitress”): we can speculate that Hemans meant “fair” in both senses of the word. The future anthologist—or “recorder”—of women’s experience in patriarchal culture finds an auspicious image of humility and purpose in the skies above her. As Anne Mellor argued in Romanticism and Gender (1993), Hemans was eminently a product of her era’s gender politics, and “constructed her self and poetry as the icon of female domesticity, the embodiment of the ‘cult of true womanhood.’” She was, moreover, aware of the precariousness and fragility of that sphere, susceptible as it was to changing personal circumstances and ideologies. That awareness is cannily troped here: the moon, gendered feminine, that might threaten to outshine the stars, nurtures and empowers them instead. All may be lost, however, if the moon “refuses to shine.” 
The image can take us even further. As far back as the Greeks (per Anaxagoras, 500-428 BCE), it had been established that the moon shines by reflected sunlight. The sun was a traditionally masculine symbol of energy, with life-giving and illuminating power; as such Hemans’s moon could be seen as drawing her special qualities from the sun, tacitly endorsing the patriarchal ideology that fostered the cult of domesticity. Yet here, in her lunar imagery, Hemans recognizes the fragility of the domestic sphere she so valorizes, the potential for refusal suggesting decisive and threatening female agency.
Hemans’s lunar imagery like astronomical imagery employed by other nineteenth-century women writers can open up wider questions and debates. Her era was one of revelation and advancement in astronomical science and theory including those on the development of the solar system, the discoveries that proved the universe to be far larger than previously thought with distances beyond human comprehension, the tallying of newly-discovered planets and moons, the development of new celestial observing and imaging techniques, and the establishment of ever grander observatories. In this volume, we hope to establish a critical conversation about British women writers of the period—as well as the topic of gender per se—and their connections to astronomy and celestial themes, broadly construed. We are open to discussions of writers in any genre, and welcome but do not insist on an expansive definition of “the nineteenth century.” 
Related areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:
Stargazing
Astrology
Non-fiction / scientific writing
Literature for children
Gendered roles in astronomy
Gendered boundaries and reception of women’s writing on astronomy
Public versus private writings on astronomy
Fantasy
Celestial Mythology
Representations of astronomical events / spaces / objects
Astronomically-themed writings about women
Although there has been significant work on the topic of astronomy and literature in the period that submitting authors are encouraged to read (by Marjorie Nicolson, Abe Delson, Marilyn Gaull, Pamela Gossin, Thomas Owens, Dometa Wiegand Brothers, Anna Henchman, and others), there has not yet been a prolonged study or edited volume on the topic of astronomy and women writers specifically. As such, authors should feel free to join close-reading and analytical methodologies with wide-ranging considerations that may help us to establish a new field of inquiry.

Abstract Submission GuidelinesSend abstracts of approximately 500 words with 5 keywords and a CV in Word or PDF format to comet@usna.edu by 15 January 2025. Please mention ‘NCGS Abstract Submission’ in the subject-line of the email. (Selected proposals will solicit final essays of 5,000 to 8,000 words, due by March 15.)