Censorship—the Knot that Binds 
Intimacy and Women’s Writing
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u
University of Nova Gorica, Research Centre for Humanities, Vipavska 13, 5000 Nova Gorica
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4225-0422
katja.mihurko.poniz@ung.si
“Dimitrie Cantemir” Christian University Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 
Splaiul Unirii 176, Bucharest
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3654-6809
carmen.dutu@ucdc.ro
9
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.1 (2023)
The connection between the private—often considered as the realm of the 
intimate—and women’s writing has long preoccupied feminist criticism. Recent 
feminist criticism has revealed the social impact of the connection between intimacy 
and women’s writing. This also raises the question of how women have negotiated 
these nuances and positions. Were there any strategies, any coping mechanisms 
with regard to employing intimacy in their writing? In this review article, we provide 
a brief overview of how censorship, gender and intimacy have been intertwined 
throughout history. Building on Sue Curry Jansen’s view which regards censorship 
as “the knot that binds knowledge and power” we further claim that we could 
regard censorship as the knot that binds intimacy and women’s writing. We also 
corroborate our assertions with examples from prominent studies focusing mainly 
on Western European literatures and add further examples of encounters with 
various forms of censorship, as experienced by Zofka Kveder, a writer who actively 
participated in Slovenian, German, Czech, and Croatian literary systems.
Keywords: feminist literary criticism / women’s writing / intimacy, censorship / self-
censorship / Kveder, Zofka
Introduction
The connection between the private—often considered as the realm 
of the intimate—and women’s writing has long preoccupied feminist 
criticism.1 In the reader edited by Susan Ostrov and entitled Women 
1 This work was written as part of the project “Slovenian Writers and Imperial 
Censorship in the Long Nineteenth Century” (J6-2583), financially supported by the 
Slovenian Research Agency.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
10
and Romance the studies selected by the editor enable us to trace this 
preoccupation ever since the first wave feminism. Within the triad pri-
vate space, romantic love and writing, intimacy seems to have played 
a crucial role in forging a new feminine identity, at odds with the pa-
triarchal blueprint of traditional societies. Women’s writing circulated 
these ideas, established invisible—but nonetheless powerful—connec-
tions and inscribed women’s perspectives on all matters intimate onto 
their reader’s mentality. More recent studies within feminist criticism 
have revealed the social impact of the connection between intimacy 
(now regarded as a cultural category) and women’s writing. At Home 
in the World: Women Writers and Public Life, from Austen to the Present 
(DiBatista), or Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geography  (Moss and 
Donovan) articulate detailed exposés on women’s role as cultural trans-
mitters. Such studies reveal the role women had in history, when deal-
ing with matters of the intimate, domestic life, love and escapism. In 
effect, these issues had been thoroughly explored outside the scope of 
the gendered perspective by Anthony Giddens in his referential study 
The Transformation of Intimacy. In contrast to much of the domi-
nant discourses on the role of intimacy in modern culture, Giddens 
takes a Habermasian2 stance in arguing that women’s writing played a 
major role in in the radical blurring between the private and the public 
spheres, thus triggering a paradigm shift in the way emergent modern 
societies were doing intimacy (Jackson and Sik Ying Ho). However, 
feminists have since then critiqued this position—starting from draw-
ing attention to the particular nuances of a post-bourgeois conception 
of a public sphere (Fraser) and ending with the latest study in the field: 
Women Writing Intimate Spaces. The Long Nineteenth Century at the 
Fringes of Europe (Lindh Estelle, Duțu, and Parente-Čapková). The 
particular concern of the editors of the latter volume was the issue of 
intimacy bound up with spatiality. As the title suggests, the contribu-
tors focused on a neglected geographical area—the fringes (or, argu-
ably, peripheries) of Europe in relation to intimacy, or better yet, to 
the different intimacies identifiable in the emerging modern societies in 
these parts of Europe, at the turn of the twentieth century.
It is thus clear that the feminist scrutiny has raised awareness and 
has called for further nuancing the discussion related to the intimacy 
paradigm shift. There are, in fact, a variety of viewpoints on intimacy 
in regard to women’s writing from the eighteenth century onward, 
2 We are referring here to the concept of public sphere as developed by Jurgen 
Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Cat-
egory of Bourgeois Society.
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy …
11
ranging from attachment to the culture of adultery, from eros to anti-
intimacy. This also raises the question of how women have negotiated 
these nuances and positions. Were there any strategies, any coping 
mechanisms with regard to employing intimacy in their writing?
In her research on German romantic female authors, Barbara 
Becker-Cantarino tackles this issue by coining the concept of “gender 
censorship.” She notes that in the canon of German romanticism the 
discourse on sexual difference and writing functions “as a discourse 
of censorship” (Becker-Cantarino 81). In the wake of classicist and 
romantic aesthetics, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte 
is extremely resolute when addressing the issue of regulating women’s 
writing within the scope of utilitarianism: he deems women writers’ 
“products” as not being worthy of the Republic of Art, namely the 
realm of philosophy or science, traditionally regarded as male only 
areas, not to be trespassed by women. This would be, Fichte contended, 
against “natural law.” Even if this Fichtean social philosophy had been 
challenged, women were still subordinated to men at the period of the 
intellectual movements, according to subsequent Becker-Cantarino’s 
argument (82). Moreover, even after several generations, when certain 
women writers did manage to establish themselves as authors, the sta-
tus of a woman writer was still regarded as beyond the realm of respect-
ability of their gender norms. In actual fact, when applied onto the 
emerging women’s literary production, all the overt or covert control 
exercised by men around them did not differ fundamentally from the 
formula of censorship practices (84).
Historically, various forms of censorship have markedly shaped the 
creative process of writers. Not only state censorship but also inter-
ventions by editors, publishers and translators may be regarded as 
censorship practices. They could be understood as an implicit form 
of censorship, which comprises “an area that is not strictly codified 
legally, wherein no one can ever be sure whether the boundaries have 
been trespassed or not, or predict what kinds of penalties they might 
face” (Dović 169). Particularly subjects pertaining to a broad range 
of morality, gender, and intimacy (love, sexuality, family connections, 
friendship) have been severely scrutinized by censors who determined 
what was (in)appropriate in the field of artistic expression. It didn’t 
take long for censors to realize that the moral standards imposed on 
women could be questioned, and in the worst case, even rejected, by 
the influence that popular women’s works had on other women.
In this review article, we provide a brief overview of how censorship, 
gender and intimacy have been intertwined throughout history. Using 
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
12
Sue Curry Jansen’s perspective as a foundation, which sees censorship 
as “the knot that ties knowledge and power,” we further assert that we 
could see censorship as the knot tying intimacy and women’s writ-
ing together. We further add additional examples of encounters with 
various forms of censorship, as experienced by writer Zofka Kveder, 
who actively participated in Slovenian, German, Czech, and Croatian 
literary systems, to support our claims with examples from renowned 
studies focusing primarily on Western European literatures.
Censorship conducted by religious and secular authorities
Probably the first influential female voice that was violently silenced be-
longed to Hypatia (born c. 350–370 AD; died 415 AD), a Neoplatonic 
philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. The aggressive mob 
murdered her to stop her influence on Alexandrian politics.
Gender censorship was applied by critics also after the death of the 
female author. This can be traced in the early reception of Sappho’s 
work in the Attic comedy. The latter attributed to Sappho many lov-
ers who lived before or after her, so that even the Roman philosopher 
Seneca seriously wondered whether Sappho was a public whore and 
Byzantine grammarians even speculated that there were two women 
of that name: one was said to have been a famous poetess, the other a 
notorious courtesan and heroine of comedies. In the second century, 
the Roman Catholic writer Tatian painted an even more negative pic-
ture of her when he wrote about her promiscuous sexual life, which 
was supposedly described shamelessly in her poems (Gantar 60). Such 
portrayals did not affect Sappho’s creativity, since they occurred only 
after her death, but for many women writers after her, equating their 
literature or heroines with themselves and their intimate lives had far 
more negative consequences.
However, for the very origins of the word censorship, we need to shift 
to Rome, where the word censor was used from the fifth century BC. 
Censor was the officer who conducted the census, regulated the morals 
of the citizens, counted and classified them (see Swithinbank). Even 
with such an early definition of the censor’s duties, it is clear how para-
mount morality was. In the history of censorship, next to statements 
regarded as hostile to the state and the religious establishment, moral-
ity is the most frequent reason for authorities’ interventions in texts. 
In the Middle Ages, the most infamous attempt to silence women was 
undoubtedly the burning of the book The Mirror of Simple Souls and its 
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy …
13
author, the beguine Marguerite Porete (?–1310) at the stake in 1310. 
Not just the content of Porete’s book but also her status of beguine 
(i.e., the Christian lay-order without taking religious vows) were prob-
lematic for the Catholic Church. One of the taboos Porete had vio-
lated was writing the book in Old French rather than in Latin. She was 
ordered not to circulate her ideas or the book again. In spite of this, she 
continued to do so (Piron).
Book burning can be described as an extreme, repressive censor-
ship, which occurs when the work is already in the public—it may 
circulate as a manuscript as in Porete’s case or be printed or performed. 
However, the religious authorities also tried to act in advance and pre-
vent any attempt to spread ideas considered dangerous, and in this way 
exercised preventive censorship.
The Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum is one of the forms of 
this particular type of censorship. It was first issued in 1559. The first 
woman to be placed on the list was Magdalena Haymairus (1535–1586) 
in 1569, who was listed for one of her children’s books. Other women 
include Anne Askew (1521–1546), Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–
1555), Ursula of Munsterberg (1491,1495, or 1499–1534), Veronica 
Franco (1546–1591), and Paola Antonia Negri (1508–1555) in the 
sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century we find Madame de Staël 
(1766–1817) with her novel Corinne ou l’Italie on the list and George 
Sand (1804–1876). Even if the Index has not been so important since 
the nineteenth century, the following authors and their works can be 
found on it in the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908–
1986) The Second Sex (1949) and The Mandarins (1954) and Maria 
Valtorta’s (1897–1961) work about the life of Jesus Christ entitled The 
Poem of the Man-God (1959). From the year 1966 the Index does not 
have the force of ecclesiastical law with the associated censures but it 
keeps its moral force.
Book censorship was exercised not only by the Catholic Church, 
but also by secular authorities. For instance, in Austria, the strict regu-
lation of state censorship coincides with the Age of Enlightenment. 
In 1751, Maria Theresa established a censorship commission. Book 
censorship lasted until the March Revolution, while theater pre-cen-
sorship lasted until the end of the monarchy. There is no doubt that 
the primary task of censorship was to protect the authorities (secular 
and ecclesiastical), but the area of morality was also very important for 
censors. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, censorship was supposed 
to push back ignorance and superstition, furthermore one of the tasks 
of censorship was to change old customs and practices that appeared 
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14
coarse and uncouth in the eyes of the enlightened people. In addition, 
censorship was to contribute to the development of modern, stricter 
morals and the refinement of manners (Bachleitner 50).
As for women writers, at the time of Maria Theresa (1751–1791) we 
find the works of Marianne-Agnès Falques (1720–1780), the author of 
romance novels, on the list of banned books. Later, in the first half of 
the nineteenth century, the following names appear: Marie-Adélaide 
Barthélemy-Hadot (1763–1821), Sophie von Brentano (1766–1800), 
Anna Eliza Bray (1790–1883), and George Sand, the latter with 17 
titles (Bachleitner 111, 328, 336, 347).
Why were Sand’s novels so problematic for Austrian censors? 
Bachleitner examines Consuelo (1842–1843), a historical novel that 
refers unkindly to Austria and is set about half in Vienna. In Consuelo, 
Sand bluntly attacks the monarchy and its representatives. Her main 
charge is that absolute power corrupts character. The proximity to the 
Gothic novel provided an additional argument for the censors to put 
Consuelo on the list, since everything linked to superstitions was prob-
lematic for the Austrian censorship (Bachleitner 348–350).
George Sand’s historical drama Les Mississipiens (1840) was also 
placed on the list of banned works. This play varies the theme that 
George Sand dealt with in numerous novels: failure of love and mate-
rialistic thinking against the background of financial speculation. Anti-
Semitic tones are also struck in the text: Samuel Bourset is the despised 
“modern Shylock” who provides the upper classes with money or 
shares, but often ruins them financially. Such an image of the Jew was 
not appropriate, since Austrian society was also dependent on Jewish 
capital and the audience could find parallels with Salomon Rotschild, 
an important Austrian financier. The moral issues were problematic in 
this work as well. In Missisipiens, as in most of her texts, Sand presents 
marriage as a field of speculation in which young, unmarried girls are 
treated like stocks on the market (Bachleitner 378–380).
Further east, in Russia, which—next to Austria—historically had 
the strictest censorship in Europe, Evdokia Rostopchina (1811–1858) 
and her ballad “Nasil’nyi brak” (“The Forced marriage,” 1845) were 
sharply criticized by censors. L. Schlosberg discusses the case of the 
‘Rostopchina ballad’ which became a platform for social gossip about the 
marital hardships of the countess and her husband Andrei Fedorovich, 
allegedly addressed in the poem. Thus, the critic points out that the cen-
sorship initially targeted the subject matter: it was taboo due to public 
pressure exercised onto women writers who were expected to exclude 
personal matters from the act of writing. Moreover, Rostopchina fell 
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy …
15
even further into disgrace and was banished from court when tsar 
Nicholas I apparently misinterpreted her poem as a political allusion to 
the forced ‘marriage’ of Poland with the Tsarist empire. Consequently, 
“around this time, the countess abandoned poetry in favor of writing 
prose, blank verse dramas, and stories” (Schlosberg 2064–2065).
The use of pseudonyms can also be seen as a form of dealing with 
censorship. Most often, women writers chose pseudonyms because 
they assumed that their writings would be more successful it they had a 
male name on the cover. Sometimes, as in the case of Zofka Kveder, the 
decision was not voluntary. At the time of her first publications, Zofka 
Kveder was employed in the office of Ivan Šušteršič, a lawyer who was 
also a politician advocating Catholic values and views on women’s role. 
He found unacceptable that his female employee would write literature 
and therefore he required her to write under a pseudonym.
Censorship interventions by family members, friends, and 
editors
It was fairly typical for women writers’ relatives or acquaintances to act 
as censors by burning their correspondence. We recall here the grand-
daughter of Madame de Sévigné who ordered her son-in-law to burn 
her grandmother’s letters after her death. Fortunately, he had the letters 
copied (Fleré 5–6). But even where letters were not burned, they were 
often manipulated, edited. Peter Sabor writes that in the first collected 
edition of Jane Austen’s letters, published in 1884, some passages or 
even whole pages were removed from the manuscripts. Occasionally, 
Victorian defenders of morality would completely remove from print-
ed books the fragments dealing with anything connected to bodily 
humors or explicit language, as revealed in one of Jane Austen’s corre-
spondence letters with her sister Casandra, one of the manuscripts that 
have reached us to-date. Visiting the premises of a school, she finds a 
study room “full of all the modern Elegancies—& if it had not been for 
some naked Cupids over the Mantelpiece, which must be a fine study 
for Girls, one should never have smelt Instruction” (Sabor 129–130).
Obviously, her publisher Richard Bentley3 also had to think of the 
financial aspect of releasing Austen’s letters. For the same reason, the 
3 After Austen’s works had been out of print for 14 years, in 1832 Henry and Cas-
sandra Austen and T. Egerton sold the publishing rights of all six of Austen’s novels to 
publisher Richard Bentley.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
16
editors of the French newspaper Le Matin censored Colette’s texts. 
According to Jeanne A. Ojala, there has always been a conflict between 
the moral and economical components of the censorship process, 
which is how the economy-related censorship issue in Colette’s case 
is explained. However sensitive they might have been to the bour-
geois’ public moral demands, excessive censorship was bound to trigger 
financial cutbacks. Consequently, the authors of potentially censored 
published material would never be prosecuted on moral grounds. These 
economic realities explain how The Ripening Seed (Le Bli en herbe, 1922) 
featuring a theme violating social norms of the time (an older woman 
seducing a teenager) was published by Le Matin in a series, at least to a 
point, long after some members of the public reacted to the theme. The 
economical factor could also explain another Colette series (in 1931), 
this time overtly hinting at homosexuality (of both genders). As Colette 
notes, the editor “cut my text in the middle of a sentence, and sent me a 
letter informing me that he was calling a halt to Ces Plaisirs … because 
it was not to the taste of his mass readership” (Ojala 541–542).
Similarly, Radclyffe Hall’s (1880–1943) lesbian novel The Well 
of Loneliness (1928) was banned. It all began with a note from James 
Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express: “I would rather give a healthy 
boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.” (Douglas 
38) The ensuing obscenity trial ended with the banning of a novel. 
Judge Biron concluded his judgement with the following words: “[…] 
I have no hesitation whatever in saying that it is an obscene libel, that 
it would tend to corrupt those into whose hands it should fall, and that 
the publication of this book is an offence against public decency, an 
obscene libel, and I shall order it to be destroyed.” (Biron 49)
Any allusion to sexuality was problematic both in printed texts 
and in theater. Slovenian censor Fran Milčinski referred to women as 
he rejected a popular French comedy Florette and Patapon (1906) by 
Maurice Hennequin and Pierre Veber on the following grounds: “The 
play is not suitable for our moral audience, for the wives and daughters 
of our officials, and for our always very numerous student visitors. The 
actions and expressions of the play are too obscene!” (Milčinski)
This analysis highlights a crucial fact about moral instruction that 
is present in nineteenth-century Austrian censorship. As a result of the 
fact that its regulatory or disciplinary procedures are founded on gen-
der relations and the patriarchal structure of society, bourgeois ideolo-
gy’s key objective of censoring women’s sexual desire also collides with 
the censorship of the theater at this point. While the Enlightenment 
believed that it was important to educate the general populace and that 
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy …
17
this aim included the study of sexuality, the focus of attention in the 
nineteenth and early twentieth century was on the bourgeoisie, particu-
larly women. The (male) students were presumably not the target audi-
ence that the censor truly had in mind, given that the majority of them 
had already had sexual contact with domestic servants or in brothels 
during this time; instead, the wives and daughters of officials were to 
be given greater weight.
Another example of censorship of explicit sexual desire is Zofka 
Kveder’s novella Eve (Eva, 1904). The story depicts sexual intercourse 
between a woman from a wealthy and respected Croatian peasant family 
and her servant. At some point, Eve gives in to her passion and becomes 
pregnant. She is overwhelmed with shame and sees the only way out 
in suicide; thus the novella ends with Eva stabbing herself to death. 
Kveder sent the novella to Ljubljanski zvon (a renowned Slovenian peri-
odical). Her correspondence with the editor, Fran Zbašnik, reveals the 
editor’s desire to have her alter or omit some passages from the origi-
nal manuscript. Judging by her response, Kveder must have given in 
under financial pressure. She requested the manuscript from the editor 
so that she may publish it in German because her text was too daring 
for the Slovenian audience: “I know Ljubljana, unfortunately you are 
right.—For me a character like Eva is something grandiose. Her sui-
cide is based on a true incident down in Croatia.—But I know—in 
Ljubljana people would sniffle.” (Kveder)
Self-censorship practices and strategies
In order to avoid censorship, women writers tried to find alternative 
ways to publish their works. By exploring these strategies, we move 
from the traditional definition of censorship to the realm of the so-
called new censorship, which “stresses the multiplicity of forms of cen-
sorship and the generative effect of censorship, an activity hitherto seen 
as purely repressive” (Bunn 25). New censorship theory offers a more 
complex understanding of the entire censorship phenomenon, and, 
consequently, is more open to different perspectives, such as feminist 
literary criticism.4 In Annette Kuhn’s view, censorship is “not reducible 
to a circumscribed and predefined set of institutions and institutional 
activities, but is produced within an array of constantly shifting dis-
4 On new censorship theory, see Gilbert; Curry Jansen; Freshwater; and the articles 
in this thematic issue by Annell, Kārkla, and Eglāja-Kristsone.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
18
courses, practices and apparatuses. It cannot, therefore, be regarded as 
either fixed or monolithic” (Kuhn 127).
The most common method of avoiding censorship was probably to 
use a pseudonym, particularly a male identity. As Becker-Cantarino 
points out, this wasn’t typically the case prior to the romantic era. She 
argues that writers of the older generation “such as Sophie La Roche 
(1730–1807) or Anna Louisa Karsch (1722–1791), consciously pre-
sented themselves as professional authors after a first work received crit-
ical acclaim—though they remained well aware of their status as excep-
tions, if not anomalies, in literary culture” (Becker-Cantarino 89–90).
On the other hand, after 1800 women often published anony-
mously or under a masculine pen-name and had their work revised or 
even signed by men. Becker-Cantarino gives the example of Caroline 
Schlegel-Schelling, who published nothing under her own name, but 
reported about her writing in her letters. In one of them she writes: 
“On Thursday Schelling submitted an article that I … [had] com-
posed; I would not have wanted it under my name in any case … 
Schelling did away with the epistolary form I had initially given it and 
incidentally teased me a lot because of my great affection for the play 
and everything connected with it that had been so obvious; I had to 
laugh myself realizing what a feminine appearance it had. With much 
joking we removed the traces of gentle hands one by one.” (Becker-
Cantarino 87) As Becker-Cantarino argues, “‘[g]ender censorship’ led 
to repressions, omissions, concessions, and modifications in literary 
texts, especially in novels, which contemporaries read as representa-
tions of real life” (91).
To illustrate how ‘gender censorship’ worked via textual interven-
tions, Becker-Cantarino brings forth the example of The Seldorf Family 
(Die Familie Seldorf, 1796–1797), a family saga by Therese Forster-
Huber which was well received due to its apparent endorsement of 
patriarchal order. The topic of the wayward daughter who refuses mar-
riage is no doubt masqueraded—yet another method of eluding cen-
sorship (Becker-Cantarino 91).
In a similar vein, according to Mulvey-Roberts, both family sagas 
and the Gothic novel “allowed women to overcome the censorship 
that barred female literature from tackling taboos such as incest and 
rape” (Mulvey-Roberts 2638). Yet not only novels were subject to 
gender censorship. Drama is equally productive in this sense, foster-
ing the fragmentation of characters and dramatic. This fragmentation 
is at work in Caroline von Günderrode’s dramas with open ends, for 
instance in Magie und Schicksal and Hildgund, which is a re-writing 
Katja Mihurko Poniž, Carmen Beatrice Dut,u:     Censorship—the Knot that Binds Intimacy …
19
of Atilla’s legend. In Hildgund, the woman playwright leaves an open 
ending: “Where a male hero would be able to stab away, this drama 
breaks off, because the desire of the heroine, formulated in a mono-
logue, appears immoderate.” (Hoff 106–108)
Virginia Woolf is a good demonstration of a writer who used self-
censorship in the early twentieth century in the context of marketing 
tactics. As Vara Neverow notes, Woolf was aware that she was widely 
read by different audiences: “a mixed-gender public readership, a pri-
marily female readership, and an intimate readership consisting mainly 
of family and friends.” (Neverow 57) Consequenty, for “the general 
readership Woolf avoided or downplayed topics likely to provoke dis-
approval—for example, Mrs. Dalloway is very covert with regard to 
Sapphic and male homoerotic desire. Directed mainly to a female audi-
ence, A Room of One’s Own might be a bit more explicit about sexuality 
and gender hostilities” (58).
Woolf’s counterpart in Central Europe, Zofka Kveder, also prac-
ticed self-censorship; however, she did not downplay topics, but a 
genre. In 1900, she published a collection of short stories (sketches) 
Mystery of a Woman (Misterij žene), which was rather praised by many 
progressive critics and readers. However, conservative critics were soon 
to react negatively. In 1902, Oton Župančič, one of the most promi-
nent Slovenian poets of that time—and the occasional literary critic—
published a survey of Slovenian short stories and wrote about Kveder’s 
book in very harsh terms: “‘The mystery of a woman’ by Zofka Kveder 
is not really literature, but cultural and social history. Those sketches 
are of bad literary taste, the visionary images are exaggerated, the sym-
bolism is superficial. ‘The mystery of a woman’ belongs to the so-called 
veristic literature, with tendencies that smell too much of demagogy 
and have nothing to do with literature.” (Župančič 25)
While Župančič wasn’t the only one to have offered unfavorable 
criticism, other critics’ points of emphasis were different. They had 
written about content, while Župančič addressed structural issues 
(the genre employed by Kveder in her writing, for instance). As a 
young feminist, Kveder was determined to write about women’s sub-
ordination and domestic violence, and she continued to do so after 
publishing her Mistery of a Woman. However, following Župančič’s 
criticism, she never published another collection of sketches as a self-
censorship strategy.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
20
Conclusion
From the point of view of gender, intimacy and morality, censorship 
proves to have always been a project that not only protects the political 
immutability of monarchical boundaries, the organization of the state 
apparatus, and the inviolability of the Church, but has intervened in 
the private sphere of individuals, especially women. In this review ar-
ticle, we aimed to structure a brief exploration of the historical entan-
glements between censorship, intimacy and women’s writing. Having 
established the paramount importance of the cultural contract of inti-
macy at the societal level, we have pointed out how the establishment 
has become very sensitive to the reworkings of intimacy in women’s 
writing, due to its high social modelling potential (Bandura). Soon, 
policing scenarios of intimacy become scenarios of censorship.
In this respect, we have argued that because the bourgeois society 
has created different codes of conduct for women and men, the recep-
tion of their works was also differently perceived—it became gendered. 
We have seen that women’s works, usually describing the private lives 
of their female protagonists and dealing with themes of intimacy, love, 
friendship, and other relationships, are even more exposed to the criti-
cal interventions of editors. As a result, on the one hand we have pro-
vided examples of how the criteria for censoring or rejecting an author’s 
work were tied together with the impact the work would have on the 
audience. On the other hand, in accordance with the “new censorship 
theory,” we have provided several examples of how the gender restric-
tions have also been ingrained in the act of literary creation itself.
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Cenzura – vozlišče, ki povezuje intimnost in 
žensko literarno avtorstvo
Ključne besede: feministična literarna veda / literarno ustvarjanje / ženske / intimnost / 
cenzura / samocenzura / Kveder, Zofka
Povezava med zasebnim, ki pogosto velja za področje intimnega, in ženskim 
pisanjem že dolgo zaposluje feministično kritiko. Novejše študije v femini-
stični kritiki so razkrile družbeni vpliv povezave med intimnostjo, ženskim 
literarnim avtorstvom in cenzuro oziroma samocenzuro. Ob tem se posta-
vlja vprašanje, kako so literarne ustvarjalke ubesedovale tematike, povezane 
z intimnostjo, ki so bile neprimerne, da jih obravnava avtorica. Ali so obsta-
jale kakšne strategije, kakšni mehanizmi spoprijemanja s tem? V preglednem 
znanstvenem članku najprej podajava kratek pregled, kako so se cenzura, spol 
in intimnost prepletali skozi zgodovino. Izhajajoč iz študije Sue Curry Jansen, 
ki cenzuro obravnava kot »vozlišče, ki povezuje znanje in moč«, trdiva, da bi 
lahko cenzuro obravnavali kot vozlišče, ki povezuje intimnost in žensko lite-
rarno avtorstvo. Svoje trditve podkrepiva s primeri iz odmevnih študij, ki se 
osredotočajo predvsem na zahodnoevropske književnosti, in dodajava primere 
srečanj z različnimi oblikami cenzure, kot jih je izkusila Zofka Kveder, pisa-
teljica, ki je aktivno sodelovala v slovenskem, nemškem, češkem in hrvaškem 
literarnem sistemu.
1.02 Pregledni znanstveni članek / Review article
UDK  82.091:351.751.5 
305-055.2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i1.01