Search Results

This chapter discusses the plight and sorrow of the Victorian and Edwardian women in the face of their husband's death. In the 19th century, the mortality rates were high producing high rates of widowed people particularly women because of the mortality differential favouring women and the higher rates of remarriage for widowed men. Widowhood in the early Victorian times was often seen as an end of marriage, a devastating experience on women whose central role was to be a dutiful wife and guardian of the family. The status of widows in the Victorian period was greater than that of a spinster but less than that of a wife. The chapter also discusses the stages of grief, bereavement and the emotional trauma in the lives of widowed women, as well as the symptoms and behavioural characteristics of grief seen in the middle and upper classes in the 19th and the 20th century. The chapter also tackles the different consolations of widowhood found within the comfort of religious family and memory. A case study on the peculiar widowhood of Lady Holland is also included in this chapter.

This chapter argues that Victorian feminist and women’s magazines contravened the gender dynamics of mainstream settler emigration discourses by producing positive visions of female emigrant mobility and by appropriating settler domesticity to empowering effects. The first half of the chapter focuses upon settler emigration literature in Eliza Cook’s Journal, arguing that it engaged with a range of domestic, artisanal, sentimental, and radical affiliations in order to open up powerfully feminized new vistas in the colonial imagination. It presents a close analysis of Eliza Meteyard’s ‘Lucy Dean: The Noble Needlewomen’ in this context. The second half focuses upon the writings of emigration promoter and journalist Maria Rye for the English Woman’s Journal and Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It argues that Rye’s work elucidates a broader moment of overlap in the histories of settler emigration and liberal feminism, when emigration became implicated in attempts to expand narrow conceptions of feminine work and mobility.

Historical research reveals the typical Victorian woman as a mental and moral cripple; incapable of informed and independent judgement; timid; deferential; vacuous; and as a slave to conventional opinion, to class prejudice, and to a narrow and bigoted morality. Clearly, a Victorian woman writer was not a ‘typical’ Victorian woman, and Elizabeth Gaskell's letters give a delightful sense of her lively and energetic life-style. Although her letters seem to show Gaskell as an anomaly, ‘almost too vivid and aware for her circle’, it is misleading to see all Victorian women as ‘shackled by a cramping and inflexible domestic ideology’. Female friendship was an important counterweight to domesticity, but very few, even of the avowed feminists of the period, wanted to remove women from the home. As early as 1838, we find Gaskell conscious of tension between home duties and a longing for freedom. She never openly speaks of sexuality and desire. This chapter explores Gaskell as a ‘relative creature’ – defined by her status as daughter, wife and mother – and highlights the enriching rather than the cramping aspects of these roles.

This book examines why Victorian women of letters such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Coleridge, and Virginia Woolf self-consciously performed collective identification with Greek letters and showed literary interest in their translations of with Greek tragedy. It considers how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. It discusses the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega, and how they turned ancient Greek into a language of and for desire. The book argues that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, and that their passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation. Five tragedies are analyzed to elucidate the legacy of Ladies' Greek: Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, Electra, Hippolytus, and Bacchae.

This chapter addresses a different set of female anxieties — one that has less to do with outright violence and more to do with cultural expectations and social demands. The dominant issues in ghost stories by Victorian and Edwardian women do not concern women being murdered or physically abused by men but rather marriage and motherhood. In stories focused on these themes, the tensions between the idealized expectations surrounding feminine roles and the far less fulfilling realities of marital life for many women are brought to the fore. Ghost stories that address marriage, according to Catherine Lundie, deal with infidelity, psychological and sexual abuse, arranged marriages, and the incompatibility of partners. In this chapter the author surveys a variety of ghostly American tales by Victorian and Edwardian women that attend to the subjects of marriage and motherhood and that reflect differing opinions on the subjects.

In this essay, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra explores the career of an important yet neglected artist whose work in the illustrated press deserves more concentrated attention. From 1885 to 1895, Clemence Housman (1861–1955) worked as an engraver for the Graphic (1869–1932), but by the mid-1890s there was little work in the trade since most papers were converting to systems of photomechanical reproduction. She then transitioned to fine-art wood engraving in the book trade, producing several exquisite titles in collaboration with her brother Laurence Housman, including The Were-Wolf (1896). She continued working the field until the 1920s, eventually producing her masterpiece, an engraving of James Guthrie’s ‘Evening Star.’ The trajectory of her career not only demonstrates how new reproductive technologies altered women’s work in the periodical press over the course of the nineteenth century but also reminds us of the thousands of other women who contributed to this industry but have been largely overlooked in press history. Indeed, as Janzen Kooistra’s essay makes clear, women were not just the subject matter or intended audience for periodical advertisements and illustrations; they were actively engaged in the production of the images that proliferated throughout the Victorian illustrated press.

In the Victorian period, the urge to match women accused of homicide to stereotypes grew stronger. This was a challenge, since at the same time the number of women tried for killing their own children was skyrocketing. Motherhood was the essential aspect of womanhood, yet the expectations seemed to be driving women to madness. The New Poor Law meant that deaths of children from neglect were being punished more severely while the injustice of the bastardy clause led to greater sympathy for unwed mothers who appeared in court. There was a huge increase in insanity verdicts. Women who killed someone other than their own child were often viewed through a prism created by fictional models as the press attempted to force the woman into an existing model.

William Shakespeare's plays are often absorbed into popular culture that revives the Victorian performer not only in a new century, but also in new media. Two examples are Kenneth Branagh's 1995 film In the Bleak Midwinter and Angela Carter's 1991 novel Wise Children. Shakespeare's work championed Victorian women and enabled actresses to occupy the stage without being accused of immorality typically thrown at the female performer. This chapter explores the complementarity of this relationship, along with the many processes of mutual translation involved in it. It considers Helena Faucit's (later Lady Theodore Martin) On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (1887) and at her husband's biography of her. Faucit was a prominent Victorian actress who played various Shakespearean roles. The chapter shows how Faucit is transformed into a Shakespearean heroine and an exemplary Victorian woman at the same time. ‘Victorian’ and ‘Shakespearean’ are synonymous terms that translate each other in Faucit's lexicon of idealised femininity.

This chapter explores the many themes and emotions—angst, jealousy, fear, and other emotives—surrounding “Modern Love” through the context and environment portrayed in the advice manuals and conduct manuals of the Victorian age. Sarah Stickney Ellis's conduct manual, for example, discusses the expectations placed upon a Victorian bride, indicating the proper role of the wife—one that is of constant self-effacement in support of husband and family. William Cobbett, on the other hand, lays down the duties and responsibilities of the husband toward his wife and his family. Thus, these manuals and commentaries compiled in the chapter give a more picturesque view of the plight of Victorian women during the age, such as the reasons for the rise of infidelity. “Modern Love” is, then, one of the many poems to which the advice manuals and social commentary in this chapter give light.

Following Elizabeth Gaskell’s defence of her friend’s posthumous reputation in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë has frequently been associated with ideas of static and feminised local place. In Shirley, however, the extent of Brontë’s preoccupation with a more expansive vision of global space and mobility becomes apparent. This chapter explores Shirley’s sophisticated understanding of global space and mobility and reveals Brontë’s topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of her friendship and correspondence with the emigrant Mary Taylor, the model for Shirley’s Rose Yorke. It concludes by showing how Taylor’s own powerful fiction and travel writing can be viewed as one of Brontë’s most radical legacies; one which has been obscured by Gaskell’s more famous memorialisation.

Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, parents gradually focused less on the patriarchal, religious, and economic duties and benefits of parenthood and more on developing loving relationships with children. This change in sentiment took place before modern medicine and public health would seem to justify it. Infants continued to perish at appalling rates even as parents came to mourn their losses with more evident anguish and less fatalistic resignation. Public health and medicine finally caught up during the twentieth century, as infant mortality rates decreased substantially. Over the generations, traditional economic and religious justifications for parenting diminished, and parents focused increasingly on their emotional relationship with their children. In the late twentieth and twenty-first century, the emotional focus of parenting continued to intensify. It also expanded into the months before birth, where it would clash with the biological reality of frequent early pregnancy loss.