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
2 - Marriage and the antifeminist woman novelist
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
All the world believed that she did really love her black-haired, florid, big-fisted Plutus, who was not a gentleman for all his acres; and that he in turn loved his faded, elderly, ultra-refined wife; and the belief counted as a medal of gold and a chain of silver in their honour.
This cynical comment from Eliza Lynn Linton's novel Patricia Kemball describes the marriage of Jabez Hamley, a self-made businessman and bully in the Bounderby mould, with the ladylike Rosina Kemball, twenty years his senior. In many respects it represents the low watermark reached by marriage in the English middle-class novel three quarters of the way through the century, when images of early Dickensian dimpling girl-brides and rosy-cheeked children were looking outmoded, even to Dickens himself. Of course the unequal marriage – whether in terms of age or status – had long been the staple material of comedy; but in the later Victorian novel, it becomes a new source of tragic social concern, as, for instance, in the marriage of Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch. Moreover, it was not just the unequal marriage that novelists explored, but the failed marriage of all kinds. It was as if the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which recognized a more widespread need for divorce, gave novelists fresh license to query the state their writing traditionally celebrated as the desirable norm.
The novelists one might have expected to correct the picture are the antifeminists: novelists such as Charlotte M. Yonge, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary (Mrs. Humphry) Ward, and Margaret Oliphant, who agreed that women essentially belonged at home – ideally as wives, but failing that, as dutiful single daughters or sisters.
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- Information
- Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question , pp. 24 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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