Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
7 - Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- 1 Responding to the woman questions: rereading noncanonical Victorian women novelists
- 2 Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
- 3 Breaking apart: the early Victorian divorce novel
- 4 Phantasies of matriarchy in Victorian children's literature
- 5 Gendered observations: Harriet Martineau and the woman question
- 6 Maximizing Oliphant: begging the question and the politics of satire
- 7 Literary women of the 1850s and Charlotte Mary Yonge's
- 8 Portraits of the artist as a young woman: representations of the female artist in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s
- 9 Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women's writing
- 10 Ouida and the other New Woman
- 11 Organizing women: New Woman writers, New Woman readers, and suffrage feminism
- 12 Shot out of the canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminism
- 13 E. Nesbit and the woman question
- 14 “An ‘old-fashioned’ young woman”: Marie Corelli and the New Woman
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
The issue of work was central to discussion of the “woman question” from the 1850s onwards. Books and periodicals commented frequently, variously, and at length on women's work in this period, employment registers and employment societies for women, including the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, were founded, and the English Women's Journal was established in 1858 largely to discuss “the present industrial employments of women” and the “best mode of judiciously extending the sphere of such employments.” Literary work, however, was a special case. As Frances Power Cobbe observed, in her 1862 overview of women's employment opportunities, there was “little need to talk of literature as a field for woman's future work. She is ploughing it in all directions already” (“What Shall We Do,” p. 375). Indeed, women had for many years been active in the literary world, working as editors, reviewers, and publishers' readers as well as poets, essayists, dramatists, and, preeminently, novelists. For literary women, then, employment issues involved not so much establishing new opportunities as exploring the relationship between femininity and literature – the connection between gender and the nature and reception of the literary product, and the difficulty of combining a literary career with a woman's domestic responsibilities. Cobbe's survey addresses a dramatic recent change in the status of women in the arts, caused by an influx of “women … distinguished for one quality above all others – namely strength” (“What Shall We Do,” p. 366).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 116 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999