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Known to millions as the imperious matriarch of Bridgerton’s court, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was still a teenager when she was chosen to be the bride of King George III. Shy, innocent, and sheltered, the orphaned princess and her youthful groom carried the hopes of a nation on their shoulders. The placid and unassuming young couple symbolised a new beginning, but soon those hopes began to sour. Charlotte and George’s marriage lasted for nearly 60 years and produced more than a dozen children, but it was beset by unrest at home, war in the colonies, and the king’s encroaching madness. As the royal couple battled against their critics, their political opponents, and sometimes ev...
A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society.
Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment defines the cultures that emerged in response to the democratization of the stock market in nineteenth-century Britain when investing provided access to financial independence for women. Victorian novels represent those economic networks in realistic detail and are preoccupied with the intertwined economic and affective lives of characters. Analyzing evidence about the lives of real investors together with fictional examples, including case studies of four authors who were also investors, Nancy Henry argues that investing was not just something women did in Victorian Britain; it was a distinctly modern way of thinking about independence, risk, global communities and the future in general.
Few people have garnered so much enduring interest as Sir Richard Burton. A true polymath, Burton is best known today for his translations of the "Kama Sutra" and "Arabian Nights." Yet, Africa stood at the center of his adult life. The Burton-Speke expedition (1856 59) that put Lake Tanganyika on the map led to years of controversy over the source of the White Nile. From 1861 to 1864 Burton served as British consul in Fernando Po and traveled widely between Ghana and Angola. He wrote prodigiously and contributed some of the first detailed ethnographic accounts of Africa s peoples. In many ways, however, Africa proved to be Burton s undoing. Injuries and sickness sapped his strength, he made ...
This study explores the prevalence of bigamy in Victorian fiction to challenge traditional understanding of the period's social and narrative conventions.
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