section_path: History/Women and literature
section_name: Women and literature
paragraph_text: Women and literature
  
  The widespread education of women was not common until the nineteenth century, and because of this, literature until recently was mostly male dominated.
  
  George Sand was an idea. She has a unique place in our age. Others are great men... she was a great woman.
  
  Victor Hugo, Les funérailles de George Sand
  
  There were few English-language women poets whose names are remembered until the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century some notable individuals include Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson (see American poetry). But while generally women are absent from the European cannon of Romantic literature, there is one notable exception, the French novelist and memoirist Amantine Dupin (1804 – 1876) best known by her pen name George Sand. One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) is the first major English woman novelist, while Aphra Behn is an early female dramatist.
  
  Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded between 1901 and 2020 to 117 individuals: 101 men and 16 women. Selma Lagerlöf (1858 – 1940) was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in The Swedish Academy in 1914.
  
  Feminist scholars have since the twentieth century sought to expand the literary canon to include more women writers.