With that said, while certainly there were “more emancipated” women who could have made fascinating characters, I think that a lot of the force of the story — at least as relates to the woman who is literally “silenced” through a curse that won’t let her talk of her troubles — would have been weakened if the silencing of women was not a solid background feature outside of the curse.

In fact, there was a Universal Suffrage plank in the platform at the fatal rally of Peterloo, in which at least one woman demonstrator was killed by the government cavalry, which outrage was what led to the founding of The Guardian a few years after, which newspaper quite blatantly called out the misogyny in “Wanted” just the other day, comparing it to a mixture of coal-tar and garbage-pail rinsings for effect…

I never took a women’s history course (something I am occasionally accused of being brainwashed by in college, to my vast amusement) – much of my articulation of feminism came as a result of reading John Stewart Mill, quite a few years after graduating from a Benedictine (as in the monks) college. Very little of what Mill said in the 1860s (about much of anything, including the desire for mindless conformity for the proles generally by the plutocratic elite) isn’t still applicable today – including all the sexist memes he catalogued and denounced in his day, and which is still regularly vivisected by feminist bloggers, particularly political ones, since the memes are still beloved of the likes of David Brooks, Steve Sailer and John Stossel and the NRO Cornerites (most of whom subscribe to VDARE philosophies, as well) and regularly appear in the punditry of the Wall Street Journal, the NYT etc.

But just as an amateur history junkie, and an art/art history buff, even one raised to be anti-feminist in the “Women don’t NEED special rights!” way, I couldn’t help but encounter both challenges to that, and to the “Women weren’t important in the past” memes – reading Mary W’s essay on how marriage was naught but legalized prostitution made me physically ill with fury, because I couldn’t admit that she was only saying what I’d long suspected watching all the Traditional Families around me (including mine) and couldn’t dare to say…two hundred years later.

Art history, and archeology, gave me not only Artemisia but obscure anecdotes that remain half-remembered after all these years: the mid-1700s widow who ran several businesses and had her own portrait painted at her desk as though she were a man, instead of demurely holding children or pets or leaning on some male relative’s shoulder; the penniless turn-of-the-18th-century amateur scholar Celtic stone carvings who married an orphaned heiress who was happy to support his studies and monographs – so long as he took her last name, which he happily did; and, of course, the way that all London society – and the officers’ quarters of the Royal Navy – was buzzing over who “A Lady” could possibly be, who was writing all these best-selling novels.

Yes, to be perfectly authentic, any “Master & Commander” type story *should* have the quarterdeck reading “Pride & Prejudice” and speculating on which famous socialite was hidden by the pen-name, according to surviving letters home from sea by Jane Austen’s brothers…

Very disappointing “safe route” choice on the part of Clarke, though there was a pleasant bit of agency on the part of the protagonists of “The Dweller in High Places” – which passes the Bechdel-Wallace test handily, rather uniquely among short fic these days.

But by the tone of your response I gather you intend something quite different?

Of course it is.

It is also an acknowledgment that it would take a writer of some considerable skill to be able to write with a 19th-century woman’s sense of injustice and normality rather than a 20th-century woman’s sense of injustice and normality – which has changed noticeably even in the 10 years that Susanna Clarke was writing JS&MN, and radically between Clarke’s childhood in the 1950s and today.

By the time Susanna Clarke was born, it had become normal and mainstream to say that enslaving black men was wrong and freeing them was right.

It is still not considered normal and mainstream in some circles to acknowledge that women in the 19th century were legally enslaved to men – nor to admit that while radical feminist ideas do gradually become mainstream and even their feminist source is forgotten, radical feminism is itself always regarded as abnormal and mockable – until the feminist revolution moves on another turn, and what was radical becomes normal.

The laws of the United Kingdom did not permit a wife financial independence from her husband – everything she owned was legally his property unless it was bequeathed or given to her with legal conditions that did not permit her husband the right to take and make use of it at will. (There was a distinction between “personal property” which was a husband’s absolutely, and “real property”, over which he had only “managerial control”.) Anything she earned herself, or anything given to her without such conditions, was his absolutely. It was legal and expected for women not to be allowed to work at the same jobs as men, and for women’s jobs to pay less than men’s jobs. It was normal and expected for the kind of work offered women to pay them far less than a living wage. It was unheard of – and considered markedly unnatural and strange – for a woman to be educated “like a man”.

In 19th-century Scotland, thanks to several Acts of Parliament in earlier centuries, it was normal for a woman to be able to read and write – all children went to local schools to learn the three Rs from the schoolmaster. Even in Scotland, though any intelligent boy could aspire to go to the nearest High School, and any boy who succeeded in going to High School could aspire to going on to university and taking a degree, no girl was expected to do more than become literate and numerate. Even that was more than most girls in England could hope for.

It was legal for a father to leave his daughter a share of the family property (her mother would most likely have nothing to leave) if and only if she married a man her brother approved of. It was also legal for a father to leave his daughter nothing at all, not on any conditions. While entails (by which a property devolved on the nearest male heir, leaving all the daughters destitute) were less common than they had been in past centuries, they still existed.

A woman couldn’t divorce her husband. A woman’s children belonged to her husband, and if he divorced her (in 1803, this was difficult and expensive, but if he could afford it, he could do it), he could legally prevent her from ever seeing her children again. A husband had a right to sexual use of his wife, and had the right under civil law to prosecute her if she refused him. A husband had a right to beat his wife providing he didn’t permanently injure her, and had also the right under civil law to prosecute anyone who tried to stop him from beating his wife: anyone who tried to stop him would have to prove that they had cause to think he might kill his wife. If she left him because he beat her, until or unless he divorced her, he could at any time take anything from her – there are actual instances of a man abandoning his wife for decades, returning to find she’d set up a successful business to support herself (she had no right to be maintained by her husband unless she was living with him) and taking all the money for himself.

And this was all normal – as normal as black people being property. Stephen Black may have been made free by Act of Parliament in 1807, but Lady Pole would not have had the right to legal custody of her children until 1839, nor the right to keep money she earned for herself until 1870.

Maintaining that any of this was unjust or unfair was radical feminism, which was as unpopular and mockable by the mainstream as radical feminism still is today. Arguing that women were the equals of men was just acceptable as light drawing-room chat (Jane Austen touches on this in her final draft of the letter scene in Persuasion) but not as any serious argument for women’s legal or human rights.

Women were considered to be the inferiors of men – neither as physically nor as mentally capable. That was normal. A man was supposed to take care of his wife and his daughters – if he didn’t or couldn’t, well, that was too bad for them. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennett’s desperation to have at least one of her daughters marry a wealthy man was cheerfully mocked by a young Jane Austen: Mrs and Miss Bates in Emma receive more respectful treatment, but their poverty was the state to which Mrs Bennett knew she would be reduced if her husband died leaving any of her daughters unmarried.

Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Charlotte Yonge – all of them wrote 19th-century novels in which they make clear their mental discomfort as intelligent women living in a society in which they were legally and socially discriminated against. All of them were aware that the treatment women received was unjust. But they lived in a culture in which the inferiority of women and the rightfulness of legal and social discrimination against women was taken for granted as normal. Susanna Clarke was born after a hundred and forty years of feminist activism had greatly changed what was considered “normal” for women: when she writes of that culture, she cannot convey either a 19th-century woman’s sense of injustice nor a 19th-century woman’s ingrained knowledge that this injustice and inequality is normal.