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In eleanor brown’s novel the weird sisters, the sisters muse: “What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?” (61–62). The sisters’ names are those of Shakespeare’s heroines, and the challenge to self-possession that they express is shared by a number of recent novels written by and addressed to women. Together, these “women’s novels” constitute a distinct grouping of Shakespearean adaptations, defined by their female authorship, their publication by large publishing houses for the trade market, and their engagement with genres such as historical fiction, romance, and chick lit that are conventionally marketed to women. Thematically, they are preoccupied with how women’s selves form in contact and conflict with Shakespeare, both individually and as part of collectives. In this way, the novels address self-development through Shakespeare, following in the footsteps of earlier presentations that emphasized Shakespeare’s improving and enjoyable qualities for an expanding middle-class public. Their educational project is staged both within the fiction and through its paratextual apparatus, which includes readers’ guides, discussion questions, blurbs, blog posts, and reader responses. In this essay, I examine how two such books—Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011)—use Shakespeare to think through women’s personal and collective identities in a patriarchal society.
My argument in this essay has two premises: first, this grouping of Shakespeare novels can be thought of as middlebrow fiction, and second, Shakespeare and the American middlebrow have had a long and closely entwined relationship. Based on these premises, I argue that in recent women’s novels, Shakespeare serves as a conduit for the fundamental middlebrow project of self-development. However, this fiction, along with its paratextual apparatus, suggests that characters and readers develop their identities not so much by respecting Shakespeare’s cultural authority, although they do gesture at times to this kind of deference, as by managing and even at times contesting his position. I characterize this ambivalence by arguing that the novels cultivate a middlebrow feminism that resists patriarchy through personal, affective modes of response rather than through advocacy for political or social change. A...