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  1. Home
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  3. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel
  • Cited by 32
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2009
Print publication year:
1998
Online ISBN:
9780511585265
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585265
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (14)
Information

Book description

Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Reviews

"A book for large collections serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty." Choice

"In The Victorian Governess, Kathryn Hughes presents a comprehensive examination of the state of the profession at mid-century for those employed spinsters." Laurie Kaplan, JASNA News

"marvelous" Victorian Studies

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