The Bride! Is an Intellectual Joyride Without the Joy

From our 21st-century perch, most contemporary women have no trouble believing that the great women writers of the 19th century got a raw deal. The first four of Jane Austen’s novels were originally published anonymously—writing was no job for a lady. The Brontë sisters published under masculine names, knowing it was the only way they would be taken seriously. And though Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley virtually invented modern science-fiction with her 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein—completed when...