<1>The nineteenth century witnessed more remarkable and numerous astronomical discoveries than had previously been made in the history of the science. Following William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, astronomers were spurred to learn more about the solar system. Instead of concentrating on cataloguing the heavens, they sought to understand their composition and forecast what was beyond their visual capabilities. The nineteenth century saw the period’s advances in physics, geology and chemistry applied to research on the composition and origins of planets, stars, comets, and nebulae. Searching for a new planet between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers discovered a series of minor planets or asteroids: Ceres (1801), Pallas (1802), Juno (1804) and Vesta (1807).
<2>In 1838 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel measured the parallax of the star 61 Cygni. His result positioned the star at approximately ten light years from the earth ___ about 60 trillion miles ___ indicating a universe much vaster than it was previously thought to be. In 1846 Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, following the independent calculations of Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, discovered the planet Neptune. Large equatorially mounted refracting telescopes were built and used to track the double stars. Building on the observations started by Sir William Herschel in the 1780s and continued by his son Sir John Frederick William Herschel, astronomers detected and listed the faint areas of light called nebulae. By 1864, 5,079 nebulae had been catalogued and by 1878 John Louis Dreyer had recorded the positions of a further 1,880 nebulae.(1) In 1846 William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, with his monster 72-inch aperture reflecting telescope ___ the Leviathan of Parsonstown ___ resolved the Great Nebula in Orion into stars, disproving the nebular hypothesis. In 1864, William Huggins, used a spectroscope to research the planetary nebula in Draco and discovered it was made of luminous gas and not stars, and thus appeared to support the nebular hypothesis.(2)
<3>During the nineteenth century some of the most significant astronomical events in the history of the science occurred, including the 1835 passing of Comet Halley, and the spectacular appearance of Comet Donati in 1858. Other major events were the total solar eclipse of 1860 and the transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882. The public eagerly followed these discoveries and events in newspapers, magazines, journals, and books, and through the visual spectacles of shows of orrery, lectures and street telescope exhibitors. Astronomy was practiced by people from all levels of society, from the members of learned societies and the wealthy male ‘Grand Amateurs’ to the working class, irrespective of age and gender. In the Victorian period astronomy became increasingly part of popular culture, due to the greater availability of books and periodicals, developments in printing techniques, and improvements in education, bringing the science to a wider public. Furthermore, the application of photography to astronomy, and advances in reproduction techniques, brought views of the heavenly bodies, including the Moon, beyond the observatory or ownership of a telescope to a greater number of spectators. Astro-photography meant that the previously unknown form of astronomical objects became part of everyday reality for many people.
<4>Therefore, it should not surprise us that astronomy was present in women's writing of the period. However, the ways in which women used and reported on astronomy in their writing has received limited critical attention in comparison with, for instance, their writings related to the science of botany. This special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies seeks to uncover some of the myriad ways in which astronomy infiltrated different forms of women’s writing of the era. Importantly, it shows how they revealed and commented on gendered constraints on women’s knowledge in astronomical science and culture. Here we include travel writing, observing records, textbooks for girls and young women, poetry, and romantic literature.
<5>To some extent all the essays in this issue take part in a process of recovery, whether it is the under-acknowledged use of astronomy by the women writers, or the unsung and undocumented part women took in astronomical science. Astronomy, like other sciences of the period, was male-dominated and increasingly so, as astronomy became more technical and professionalized. Women practicing the science often worked ‘behind the scenes’ as supporting technicians and recorders for male astronomers. Despite their ability and discoveries in astronomy, women were prevented from becoming members of scientific organizations such as the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).
<6>As an illustrative example, in 1892 the solar astronomer Elizabeth Brown, alongside two other women astronomers, was denied membership of the RAS by its male members. Women’s role in astronomy was mostly unacknowledged in official records and reports on the science. Such treatment was part of the patriarchal culture of the period, and women like Brown, in her eclipse travelogue In Pursuit of a Shadow (1887), found ways to negotiate their marginalized position as practitioners and writers on astronomy. Brown, who set about to inspire other women to practice solar astronomy, found the male-dominated genre of travel writing fruitful in encouraging women to be independent and adventurous travelers, while adhering to the culturally defined strictures of Victorian ideal femininity. Brown’s expressions of prescribed ideal feminine traits, such as humility, domesticity, and piety in her narrative, tempered any evidence of encroachment on the masculine realms of astronomy, scientific expedition, and its reportage.
<7>One exception to the banning of women from the RAS was Caroline Herschel, younger sister of William Herschel and assistant to her brother. She was elected a member of the RAS in 1835, but she was one of only three women in the nineteenth century to accomplish that goal.(3) Caroline was a skilled astronomer in her own right, making many catalogued discoveries, including eight comets and “seven deep-sky objects,” and contributing to the discovery and cataloguing (with William) of 2,500 nebulae and star clusters. Her discoveries of comets she recorded in her businesslike “Bills and Receipts” notes. Yet, despite her ability as an astronomer and her observational successes, she performed a subordinate role, domestically and astronomically, to facilitate William’s work and ensure his renown as a scientific genius. Overall, Caroline’s organizational and technical skills ___ planning telescope sweeps, observations, and data recording ___ were pivotal to her brother’s research and discoveries.
<8>Another nineteenth-century woman writer who found a way to conform to the dominant patriarchal ideology yet gain a level of scientific authority, despite the marginalization of women in astronomy in the period, was the educator Margaret Bryan. The essay here on Bryan shows how she used natural theology in her A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797). It reveals that she devised an “innovative” version of natural theology drawn from multiple sources, rather than solely the writings of William Paley. Some versions of this eclectic religious ideology were particularly suitable, as they incorporated aspects of astronomy to offer divine evidence. In doing so, Bryan ensured her teaching on astronomy conformed to what was acceptable for women writers and teachers to promote to girls and young women of her era.
<9>Throughout history, astronomical bodies such as the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars have provided allegorical imagery for writers. The Moon has been especially prominent in this usage, from antiquity and classical mythology to the present day___ and, indeed, very notably in the long nineteenth century. Here, it is particularly noteworthy in the work of women authors, including the poetry of Charlotte Smith, and the romances of Marie Corelli and Olive Schreiner. For Smith, in her melancholic sonnet 44 “Written in the Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex,” included in the 1789 edition of her Elegiac Sonnets, the Moon is the “mute arbitress,” a description with historical precedents in John Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost. Smith’s Moon, as the “mute, arbitress,” silently governs the strong equinoctial tides that erode cliffside graves and exhume the dead from “the silent sabbath of the grave” tossing them into the tumult. The Moon’s muteness implicitly questions “the muting of female power and the silencing of women’s voices,” with added significance when we recall this was the time of Mary Wollstonecraft. The Moon’s power here, is also shown to be emblematic of a volatile and threatening cosmos ___ the Moon quietly aggressive and destructive can cause the tides to tear the earth apart, suggestive of “the universe as a precarious place” and the earth’s “cosmic vulnerability” from comets and meteors ___ even as far as their impact influencing the tides to cause universal deluge ___ that was occupying scientific and lay minds at the time.
<10>In nineteenth-century women’s romances the Moon is symbolic of “imagination, escape, hope, and desertion.” In the works of two Victorian women writers, Marie Corelli and Olive Schreiner ___ opposites in their views on the rise of the New Woman ___ gendered lunar imagery is, nevertheless, a shared trait. Corelli and Schreiner both used the Moon allegorically to investigate the position of Victorian women, by embracing the romance genre’s “transcendent potential to emancipate female subjectivity.” The Moon for these writers had the capacity to “transcend material realities” and “to cast into sharper relief” the multiple facets of women’s experiences. The Moon, for both writers was a useful metaphor that enabled them to oppose contemporary strictures on women’s education and professional prospects. The genre of romance, for Corelli and Schreiner, had the ability to liberate women through “flights of the imagination, to places of elsewhere and elsewhen.”