Janet Gezari
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199543298
- eISBN:
- 9780191701306
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199543298.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written ...
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Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. This book presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. The book also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.Less
Emily Brontë's poems are more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, their very uniqueness and strangeness have made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poetry written by Victorian women. This study reinstates Emily Brontë's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. This book presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to its own inner experience of the world while seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. Although the book does not discuss all of Brontë's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. The book also brings the emotions and concerns that inform Wuthering Heights into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.
Heloise Brown
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719065309
- eISBN:
- 9781781700457
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719065309.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Political History
This book explores the pervasive influence of pacifism on Victorian feminism. It provides an account of Victorian women who campaigned for peace, and of the many feminists who incorporated pacifist ...
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This book explores the pervasive influence of pacifism on Victorian feminism. It provides an account of Victorian women who campaigned for peace, and of the many feminists who incorporated pacifist ideas into their writing on women and gender. The book explores feminists' ideas about the role of women within the empire, their eligibility for citizenship, and their ability to act as moral guardians in public life. It shows that such ideas made use – in varying ways – of gendered understandings of the role of force and the relevance of arbitration and other pacifist strategies. The book examines the work of a wide range of individuals and organisations, from well-known feminists such as Lydia Becker, Josephine Butler and Millicent Garrett Fawcett to lesser-known figures such as the Quaker pacifists Ellen Robinson and Priscilla Peckover.Less
This book explores the pervasive influence of pacifism on Victorian feminism. It provides an account of Victorian women who campaigned for peace, and of the many feminists who incorporated pacifist ideas into their writing on women and gender. The book explores feminists' ideas about the role of women within the empire, their eligibility for citizenship, and their ability to act as moral guardians in public life. It shows that such ideas made use – in varying ways – of gendered understandings of the role of force and the relevance of arbitration and other pacifist strategies. The book examines the work of a wide range of individuals and organisations, from well-known feminists such as Lydia Becker, Josephine Butler and Millicent Garrett Fawcett to lesser-known figures such as the Quaker pacifists Ellen Robinson and Priscilla Peckover.
Kate Flint
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121855
- eISBN:
- 9780191671357
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121855.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Reading, in the Victorian and Edwardian period, as now, was an activity through which women could become aware of the simultaneity of the ...
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Reading, in the Victorian and Edwardian period, as now, was an activity through which women could become aware of the simultaneity of the sensations of difference and of similarity. Reading provided the means not only, on occasion, for the Victorian woman to abnegate the self; to withdraw into the passivity induced by the opiate of fiction. Far more excitingly, it allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to know that she was not alone in doing so. The variety of evidence put forward in this book demonstrates that despite the recurrence of certain stereotypes throughout the period, and the way in which these stereotypes functioned to determine attitudes about reading in the home, in education, and in the provision of public library facilities which would serve a growing number of readers, individuals frequently read across the grain of such expectations.Less
Reading, in the Victorian and Edwardian period, as now, was an activity through which women could become aware of the simultaneity of the sensations of difference and of similarity. Reading provided the means not only, on occasion, for the Victorian woman to abnegate the self; to withdraw into the passivity induced by the opiate of fiction. Far more excitingly, it allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to know that she was not alone in doing so. The variety of evidence put forward in this book demonstrates that despite the recurrence of certain stereotypes throughout the period, and the way in which these stereotypes functioned to determine attitudes about reading in the home, in education, and in the provision of public library facilities which would serve a growing number of readers, individuals frequently read across the grain of such expectations.
Pat Jalland
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198201885
- eISBN:
- 9780191675058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198201885.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jude Piesse
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198752967
- eISBN:
- 9780191814433
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198752967.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, American, 19th Century Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Yopie Prins
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691141893
- eISBN:
- 9781400885749
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691141893.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Patsy Stoneman
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074479
- eISBN:
- 9781781701188
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074479.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Laura Schwartz
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719085826
- eISBN:
- 9781781704936
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719085826.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This book studies a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement, and looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of ...
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This book studies a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement, and looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. In uncovering an important tradition of freethinking feminism, the book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more ‘respectable’ post-1850 women's movement and the ‘New Women’ of the early twentieth century.Less
This book studies a distinctive brand of women's rights that emerged out of the Victorian Secularist movement, and looks at the lives and work of a number of female activists, whose renunciation of religion shaped their struggle for emancipation. Anti-religious or secular ideas were fundamental to the development of feminist thought, but have, until now, been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement. In uncovering an important tradition of freethinking feminism, the book reveals an ongoing radical and free love current connecting Owenite feminism with the more ‘respectable’ post-1850 women's movement and the ‘New Women’ of the early twentieth century.
Heloise Brown
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719065309
- eISBN:
- 9781781700457
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719065309.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, Political History
This chapter illustrates the historiography of pacifist feminism, within which there is a general reluctance to look back further than the First World War. The wide range of literature on the ...
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This chapter illustrates the historiography of pacifist feminism, within which there is a general reluctance to look back further than the First World War. The wide range of literature on the Victorian women's movement that has been produced over the last twenty years has either neglected the fact that many feminists were active in campaigns for international peace, or has listed ‘peace’ as a women's issue during the late nineteenth century without offering any further analysis of how women were involved, or what they did in this connection. The chapter demonstrates that there were distinct pacifist feminist arguments from as early as the 1870s. Finally, it highlights that, during the nineteenth century, the women's relationship to, and role within, the nation was being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, and that it was particularly in pacifist, internationalist and humanitarian strands of feminism that such ideas developed.Less
This chapter illustrates the historiography of pacifist feminism, within which there is a general reluctance to look back further than the First World War. The wide range of literature on the Victorian women's movement that has been produced over the last twenty years has either neglected the fact that many feminists were active in campaigns for international peace, or has listed ‘peace’ as a women's issue during the late nineteenth century without offering any further analysis of how women were involved, or what they did in this connection. The chapter demonstrates that there were distinct pacifist feminist arguments from as early as the 1870s. Finally, it highlights that, during the nineteenth century, the women's relationship to, and role within, the nation was being subjected to unprecedented scrutiny, and that it was particularly in pacifist, internationalist and humanitarian strands of feminism that such ideas developed.
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823229857
- eISBN:
- 9780823241040
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823229857.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Gail Marshall
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853236740
- eISBN:
- 9781846314285
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853236740.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
George Meredith
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300173178
- eISBN:
- 9780300189100
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300173178.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jude Piesse
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784992460
- eISBN:
- 9781526128317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784992460.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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. ...
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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.Less
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.
Megan Taylor Shockley
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814783191
- eISBN:
- 9780814786529
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814783191.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, ...
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In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family's home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917. This is the way Rebecca Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. This book examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, the book also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period's “Victorian woman.”Less
In 1852 Hannah Rebecca Crowell married sea captain William Burgess and set sail. Within three years, Rebecca Burgess had crossed the equator eleven times and learned to navigate a vessel. In 1856, 22-year-old Rebecca saved the ship Challenger as her husband lay dying from dysentery. The widow returned to her family's home in Sandwich, Massachusetts, where she refused all marriage proposals and died wealthy in 1917. This is the way Rebecca Burgess recorded her story in her prodigious journals and registers, which she donated to the local historical society upon her death, but there is no other evidence that this dramatic event occurred exactly this way. This book examines how Burgess constructed her own legend and how the town of Sandwich embraced that history as its own. Through careful analysis of myriad primary sources, the book also addresses how Burgess dealt with the conflicting gender roles of her life, reconciling her traditionally masculine adventures at sea and her independent lifestyle with the accepted ideals of the period's “Victorian woman.”
Doris Jakobsch
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195679199
- eISBN:
- 9780199081950
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195679199.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Sikhism
This book charts the history of gender construction in Sikhism by focusing on the Singh Sabha Reform Movement spearheaded by British educated Sikhs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ...
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This book charts the history of gender construction in Sikhism by focusing on the Singh Sabha Reform Movement spearheaded by British educated Sikhs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume is based on a theoretical analysis of gender construction as a variable in social organization, and the time period examined is the colonial milieu following the annexation of Punjab by the British East India Company in 1849. Gender construction as a theoretical framework is combined with an investigation of two critical phases of Sikh history: the guru period, and the Singh Sabha Reform Movement that took place under the watchful eye of the British. The book also addresses how gender constructs in England during the Victorian era informed newly articulated Sikh educational and religious reform initiatives among the Sikh elite wanting recognition by the British administration. The book tries to fill the gap created by a dearth of writing on women in Sikhism and the absence gender analysis within Sikh studies. While touching on the roles of specific players, this book deals with other political, social, and religious structures of colonial Punjab from the perspective of gender construction.Less
This book charts the history of gender construction in Sikhism by focusing on the Singh Sabha Reform Movement spearheaded by British educated Sikhs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume is based on a theoretical analysis of gender construction as a variable in social organization, and the time period examined is the colonial milieu following the annexation of Punjab by the British East India Company in 1849. Gender construction as a theoretical framework is combined with an investigation of two critical phases of Sikh history: the guru period, and the Singh Sabha Reform Movement that took place under the watchful eye of the British. The book also addresses how gender constructs in England during the Victorian era informed newly articulated Sikh educational and religious reform initiatives among the Sikh elite wanting recognition by the British administration. The book tries to fill the gap created by a dearth of writing on women in Sikhism and the absence gender analysis within Sikh studies. While touching on the roles of specific players, this book deals with other political, social, and religious structures of colonial Punjab from the perspective of gender construction.
Alison Chapman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198723578
- eISBN:
- 9780191790386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198723578.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Women's Literature
This book uncovers the British and American expatriate community in Italy, and especially Florence, in the decades leading up the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento). The women poets who lived in ...
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This book uncovers the British and American expatriate community in Italy, and especially Florence, in the decades leading up the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento). The women poets who lived in Italy and campaigned for Italian independence through their diverse writing (including poetry, journalism, reviews, serial fiction, and travel writing), as well as in their salons and their spiritualist experiments, strove to reconfigure women’s poetry into an active agent of public, political change, despite the risk involved in challenging the conventional category of the ‘English Poetess’, and in supporting a foreign policy that often went against perceived British interests in Europe. Literary history has credited Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) with the transformation of women’s poetry in a more muscular, politicized epic. Through analysis of Barrett Browning and the other poets in her network, this book deepens and complicates the literary history of women’s poetry in Britain and America in the nineteenth century, by intimately connecting Barrett Browning’s radical new epic voice with the work of her fellow poets, including Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope. All these poets published in ephemeral, serial print, and their periodical writing was part of their political poetics borrowed from Italian patriots that asserted agency, liberty, freedom, community, and action as integral to the Risorgimento. In particular the act of publication did not just establish their professional identity as expatriate writers, but also was invested in the concept of the very agency of transnational print itself to achieve political goals through a circuit of culture and action.Less
This book uncovers the British and American expatriate community in Italy, and especially Florence, in the decades leading up the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento). The women poets who lived in Italy and campaigned for Italian independence through their diverse writing (including poetry, journalism, reviews, serial fiction, and travel writing), as well as in their salons and their spiritualist experiments, strove to reconfigure women’s poetry into an active agent of public, political change, despite the risk involved in challenging the conventional category of the ‘English Poetess’, and in supporting a foreign policy that often went against perceived British interests in Europe. Literary history has credited Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) with the transformation of women’s poetry in a more muscular, politicized epic. Through analysis of Barrett Browning and the other poets in her network, this book deepens and complicates the literary history of women’s poetry in Britain and America in the nineteenth century, by intimately connecting Barrett Browning’s radical new epic voice with the work of her fellow poets, including Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope. All these poets published in ephemeral, serial print, and their periodical writing was part of their political poetics borrowed from Italian patriots that asserted agency, liberty, freedom, community, and action as integral to the Risorgimento. In particular the act of publication did not just establish their professional identity as expatriate writers, but also was invested in the concept of the very agency of transnational print itself to achieve political goals through a circuit of culture and action.
Colin Pooley, Sian Pooley, and Richard Lawton (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311413
- eISBN:
- 9781846315305
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315305
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the ...
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Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and her diary provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth's father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The book includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written retrospectively as life histories by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare first-hand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.Less
Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and her diary provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth's father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The book includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written retrospectively as life histories by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare first-hand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.
