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Annotation Focusing on the ways in which female novelists have challenged contemporary assumptions about their own sex, this book's critical interest in women's fiction shows how 19th century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and alternative of single or professional life.
In an era when women are moving into so many areas of the labour force, we all remember some of the first working women we ever encountered: 'women teachers,' as they were too often known. The impact of women on education has been enourmous throughout the English-speaking world. It has also been ignored, for the most part, by mainstream historians of education. Alison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald have addressed this omission by bringing together a wide range of essays by feminist historians on the role of women in education at all levels, in Canada, Australia, Britain, and the United States. All the essays were ground-breaking when first published. Among the subjects they explore are th...
The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects. The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure. Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.
When first published in 1977, A Literature of Their Own quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers in England. A classic of feminist criticism, its impact continues to be felt today. This revised and expanded edition contains a new introductory chapter surveying the book's reception and a new postscript chapter celebrating the legacy of feminism and feminist criticism in the efflorescence of contemporary British fiction by women.
Encouraged by the response of the avid novel-reading public in early nineteenth-century England, minor novelists produced a staggering number of volumes that shaped styles, formed attitudes, and gave to the novel a new status and respectability. These novels were read by both sexes, but the majority were written by women. Vineta Colby examines the works of such minor novelists as Mrs. Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Yonge, and Harriet Martincau, arguing that they prepared the way for the novels of the great Victorian era. Antiromantic and bourgeois in spirit, these domestic novels were concerned with daily living in ordinary society. As the form developed, the novels turned away from "idle ...
Originally published in 1981. Many of the classics of children’s literature were produced in the Victorian period. But Alice in Wonderland and The King of the Golden River were not the books offered to the majority of children of the time. When writing for children began to be taken seriously, it was not as an art, but as an instrument of moral suasion, practical instruction, Christian propaganda or social control. This book describes and evaluates this body of literature. It places the books in the economic and social contexts of their writing and publication, and considers many of the most prolific writers in detail. It deals with the stories intended to teach the newly-literate poor their social and religious lessons: sensational romances, tales of adventure and military glory, through which the boys were taught the value of self-help and inspired with the ideals of empire; and domestic novels, intended to offer girls a model for the expression of heroism and aspiration within the restricted Victorian woman’s world.
The Oxford Movement began in the Church of England in 1833 and extended to the rest of the Anglican Communion, influencing other denominations as well. It was an attempt to remind the church of its divine authority, independent of the state, and to recall it to its Catholic heritage deriving from the ancient and medieval periods, as well as the Caroline Divines of 17th-century England. The Oxford Movement and Its Leaders is a comprehensive bibliography of books, pamphlets, chapters in books, periodical articles, manuscripts, microforms, and tape recordings dealing with the Movement and its influence on art, literature, and music, as well as theology; authors include scholars in these fields, as well as the fields of history, political science, and the natural sciences. The first edition of The Oxford Movement and Its Leaders and its supplement contained comprehensive coverage through 1983 and 1990, respectively. The Second Edition, with over 8,000 citations covering many languages, extends coverage through 2001; it also includes many earlier items not previously listed, corrections and additions to earlier items, and a listing of electronic sources.
Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England
A pioneering new study of nineteenth-century kinship and family relations, focusing on the British middle class, and highlighting both the similarities and the differences in relations between brothers and sisters in the past and in the present.
"Students and teachers of Victorian women's careers will be grateful for [Mermin's] intelligent and equable guidance as they negotiate the paradoxes of Godiva's Ride." -- Modern Philology "This brief study should be enormously helpful to students seeking an introduction to feminist approaches to Victorian writers." -- Choice "Mermin's fine book is a work of synthesis that moves across many genres of women's writing... and touches on neglected writers of the period... as well as on the canonized few." -- American Historical Review "Godiva's Ride is a stimulating and enjoyable study of an exceptionally rich subject... " -- Victorian Periodicals Review "Accessible, original, and gracefully writ...