A History of Windows in Women’s Writing: Looking Out, Looking In

Windows in women’s writing do more than let in light. They frame lives, mark boundaries, and hint at what lies beyond. By tracing windows through stories by and about women, you can see how a simple architectural feature has centuries of baggage.

Early Tales: Windows as the Edge of the World

• Rapunzel

  • A girl shut away in a tower peers through a high window, her only contact with the outside world.

  • The window frames her longing and becomes the point of connection when the prince calls to her.

  • Here, the window represents both restriction and possibility.

• Other folklore

  • Maidens in ballads and fairy tales lean out of windows to see lovers or danger arriving.

  • A window acts as a threshold between safety and risk.

19th Century Domestic Fiction: Windows of Longing and Surveillance

• Jane Austen and the Brontës

  • Characters often sit at windows sewing, reading, or reflecting while watching the larger world pass by.

  • The window shows their limited movement and also their imagination reaching outward.

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

  • The narrator’s nursery has barred windows.

  • They underline her physical and psychological confinement and her inability to escape the patriarchal “treatment” imposed on her.

• Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels

  • Windows are used to show class difference — who can see out, who can be seen from the street, who closes shutters to keep out gossip.

Early 20th Century Modernism: Windows as Shifting Perspectives

• Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

  • Views through windows change with each character, showing how inner life and external scene interact.

  • A window can hold a moment still, framing memory and time passing.

• Katherine Mansfield’s short stories

  • Many begin with a description of a window view, using it as an entry into a character’s private thoughts.

Contemporary Fiction and Thrillers: Windows of Danger and Escape

• Domestic thrillers

  • A heroine watches a neighbour through a window and sees a crime, as in The Girl on the Train and similar novels.

  • The window flips from being a frame for longing to a lens of voyeurism or vulnerability.

• Global writers

  • In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stories, windows mark the line between private and public lives in Nigeria and the diaspora.

  • In Caribbean and South Asian fiction, windows sometimes show migration dreams — women looking out at airports, harbours, roads.

Why Windows Matter in Women’s Writing

• They mark a restriction: a woman can see but not go.

• They invite imagination: a view becomes a portal to a wider world.

• They signal surveillance: someone can watch from inside or outside.

• They frame transformation: a character may open, close, or break a window at a turning point.

What to Notice When Reading

• Who stands at the window, who looks in, who looks out.

• Does the author linger on the view, the glass, the barrier, or the act of opening?

• How does the window scene relate to the character’s choices or lack of choices?

Takeaway

From Rapunzel’s tower to Gilman’s barred nursery, from Woolf’s shifting perspectives to modern thrillers, windows in women’s writing have moved from a symbol of confinement to a device for suspense, self-knowledge, and escape. Looking at windows across time gives readers a concrete way to trace how women writers frame the tension between inner and outer worlds, privacy and exposure, and longing and action.