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The social novel in nineteenth-century Britain has been considered the effort of a predominantly male canon of writers. In this ground-breaking study, originally published in 1985, Joseph Kestner challenges that assumption, arguing that it was a succession of female writers – women often meriting only a footnote in literary history – who initiated and advanced the tradition of using narrative fiction to register protest, expose abuses, and promote reform. Kestner explores the contributions to Victorian social policy by the fiction of these neglected authors (Hannah More, Elizabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, Charlotte Tonna, Camilla Toulmin, Geraldine Jewsbury, Fanny Mayne, Julia Kavanagh, ...
Popular Victorian women writers considers a diverse group of women writers within the Victorian literary marketplace. It looks at authors such as Ellen Wood, Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Yonge as well as less well-known writers including Jessie Fothergill and Eliza Meteyard. Each essay sets the individual author within her biographical and literary context and provides refreshing insights into their work. Together they bring the work of largely unknown authors and new perspectives on known authors to critical and public attention. Accessible and informative, the book is ideal for students of Victorian literature and culture as well as tutors and scholars of the period.
This book offers the first extended account of the mid-century rise of ‘model women of the press’: women who not only stormed the male bastions of social and political journalism but also presented themselves as upholders of the highest standards of professional journalistic practice. They broke the codes of anonymity in several ways, including signing articles in their own names and developing distinctly female personae. They proved, by example, women’s fitness for conventionally masculine lines of journalism. By placing Victorian women’s serious, high-minded journalism firmly within the context of ‘the widening sphere’ of female professions in mid-nineteenth-century England, th...
Exploring how scholars use digital resources to reconstruct the 19th century, this volume probes key issues in the intersection of digital humanities and history. Part I examines the potential of online research tools for literary scholarship while Part II outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms.
Discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880, including serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women; sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels. During these years, some women were struggling to become women, instead of the angels of purity that sentimental morality had made of them. The sexual woman, the whore, the mistress, the runaway wife, the seduced or fallen innocent, all attracted a cluster of ideas about the differences between women and men, about the power structure in sexual relationships, and about women's place in the social and moral world. In considering these topics, this book traces women and illuminates differences in the fiction writer for different social classes. -- Publisher description
This book redefines the origins of the women's rights campaigns in Britain. Contrary to the existing historiography, which argues that the Victorian Feminist movement began in the 1850s, this book, by bringing to light a wealth of unused sources, demonstrates that a vibrant community existed during the 1830s and 1840s. Previously neglected, this remarkable group of writers and reformers established both the ideologies and personnel network which provided the foundations of the women's rights campaigns of the coming decades.