Rewriting literary history, making people aware that well before our own time women also participated in the literary field: this is one of the objectives of the Women Writers in History collaboration.¹ It means not the dropping of some additional female names, adding them to those of the small number of writing women that made it into the transnational literary canon – such as George Eliot, George Sand, Selma Lagerlöf or Harriet Beecher Stowe. It means: looking differently, adopting another perspective, taking women writers – of the past, the present and the future – more seriously.

Women like these four would often be presented as very exceptional cases in the midst of large groups of male authors, comparable to the relatively small numbers of women authors nowadays receiving literary prizes. In older, but still influential, historiography, women’s exceptionality as authors would be linked to their behaviour, which was not always similar to that of the ‘average’ European woman. However, conclusions, often drawn, about the exceptionality qua numbers, and the suggestion that so very few women would have published or would have written interesting works, have been found, during the last decades, to be false.²

In such reliable sources as catalogues of private and lending libraries dating back to the seventeenth century, or review articles and advertisements in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodicals, traces exist of many of women’s publications – and of their impact on readers. We can admit that – because of a lower degree of literacy, and frequent death in childbirth – there were, obviously, fewer women than men publishing; but from these sources we have to conclude that there were many women who succeeded in finding audiences for the books they wrote. Being well educated, they had often decided to remain single – yet they may deserve being known.

There is clearly a need for new histories that illustrate the active roles played by women in the literary field, and integrate those writers who were, at some point in history, lost or ‘forgotten’ – in spite of their having been published by publishers, reviewed in the periodical press or included in compilations of famous women. Such compilations found their origin in Boccacio’s Illustrious Women (1361) and Christine de Pizan’s response in her City of Ladies (1405), forming a genre that manifested itself in numerous European countries, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Hilde Hoogenboom has demonstrated, the compilers (both male and female) borrowed heavily from each other and reacted to predecessors, from one country to another, creating an international genre which assured remembrance for women writers.³

The enduring presence – in these compilations – of considerable numbers of women presented as ‘famous’, suggests that ‘forgetting’ earlier women authors was not a natural process, but rather a conscious decision, taken by those ‘influencers’ that were (male) historiographers of general national literatures – in particular those who were active during the nineteenth century. For such elimination, historians often found reasons in the women’s behaviour, which tended to be discussed in articles supposed to comment the books.

While for Christine de Pizan this ‘attack’ was without long lasting impact, for others it did work: they were pushed out of history – and remained outside for some time. To take another example, it lasted until the early twenty-first century⁸ for George Sand to reach again something approaching the ‘level of international celebrity’, which was hers at the end of her life.

From Christine de Pizan to George Sand and up to the twentieth century, women writers were aware of difficulties over their professional life; and they seem to have been curious about the ways in which other women authors coped. They not only read, translated, and commented upon each other’s works, but some of them entered into correspondences,⁹ decided to compile bio-bibliographic information about female predecessors,¹⁰ were proud of them, and happy to help young or future colleagues. The very existence of such (potential) connections between them, today provides important help for researchers: they allow finding the names of those who were ‘forgotten’ – especially as these documents now tend to be presented on-line. For us as researchers it becomes possible to give these women their due place within literary historiography, by describing the roles they played within the literary field of their own time and presenting them as possible models for future writers.

Important international ‘networks’ of women created themselves around successful and influential writers like, again, George Sand: for instance, those who translated her include Elizabeth A. Ashurst and Matilda M. Hays (into English), Claire von Glümer (into German), Suze Andriessen (into Dutch), Sofie Podlipská (into Czech), Elizaveta Nikolaevna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia (into Russian), Júlia Szendrey (into Hungarian)¹¹ and many, many others. Either inspired by the works they had translated, or not, often they decided – as a next step – to write and publish their own texts, in many cases addressing themselves also to women or girls.

George Sand is an interesting example, because controversies around her generated many negative reactions among male readers, which may have either inhibited women from following her example, or inspired them to do so. Most of the successful women were less controversial and easier accepted. Several of them living in smaller countries and writing in smaller languages, depended on being translated, and were actually translated – like Fredrika Bremer (Sweden), Camilla Collett (Norway), Matilde Serao (Italy), Caecilia Böhl de Faber (Spain), Božena Němcová (Czechia), Carmen Sylva (pseudonym of Queen Elisabeth of Romania). They exerted influences, all over Europe: research is being carried out about them.

The book presented here adopts another perspective: Anna Menyhért is not only the researcher who wants to know and make known what had been left out of history. She is also a fiction writer and poet herself: she is searching for her own foremothers, those who wrote in her own language, Hungarian, at the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. In Hungary the history of women’s authorship began later than in many other countries, actually thanks to several male intermediaries who played an important role, around 1800, in encouraging Hungarian women to take up their pens. These male efforts were indebted to women’s work in other countries – as Anna Fábri pointed out.¹²

Anna Menyhért looks back to five Hungarian female predecessors in a way similar to how Dutch/Swiss Belle de Zuylen/Charrière (eighteenth century) looked to her predecessor Marie de Sévigné (seventeenth century), or our present-day Dutch contemporary Nelleke Noordervliet feels inspired and encouraged by Belle de Zuylen. Menyhért compares her own feelings about these ‘foremothers’ to the current discourse on their personalities, which – as she sees it – is not doing justice to their literary merits: she is actually rewriting history from the female perspective.

It seems to us, as members of the Editorial Board of the Women Writers in History book series, that Anna Menyhért’s search for predecessors, role models, or just earlier colleagues in her own country and language, corresponds completely to our transnational intentions. It provides an illustration of the way in which the need for new historiography can be experienced by present-day women authors in search of those who came before her.