Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian NovelThis exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes, as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns, acquires or loses property, focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority, the 'woman question' and narrative form, and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text, but refers substantially to other material, both other novels and contemporary social, legal, political and feminist commentary. |
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Page 49
... once out of her hands has adventures of its own : ' It was gone from me like life - never to be recalled ' ( p.182 ) . As Hilary Schor has shown , the tension between the Johnsonian and the Cranfordian is a tension between an inherited ...
... once out of her hands has adventures of its own : ' It was gone from me like life - never to be recalled ' ( p.182 ) . As Hilary Schor has shown , the tension between the Johnsonian and the Cranfordian is a tension between an inherited ...
Page 63
... once suf- fered at the hands of an indiscriminate fate . These storms which beset the hap- less traveller are irruptions which check sequence , suspend narration , and tran- scend lyric . In Chapter 1 , the stream is used as an image of ...
... once suf- fered at the hands of an indiscriminate fate . These storms which beset the hap- less traveller are irruptions which check sequence , suspend narration , and tran- scend lyric . In Chapter 1 , the stream is used as an image of ...
Page 97
... once observed of this most potent mythological sign . In The Woodlanders they are at once a setting for pastoral and Romantic revision , and for the revision of Hardy's own earlier woodland idylls ; a locus of Darwinian struggle and ...
... once observed of this most potent mythological sign . In The Woodlanders they are at once a setting for pastoral and Romantic revision , and for the revision of Hardy's own earlier woodland idylls ; a locus of Darwinian struggle and ...
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action argues authority becomes belongs Brontë called Caroline chapter character claim collection common concern conventional Cranford critical Crossways culture desire Diana difference domestic effect England English equality expressed fact female feminine fiction figure finally Gaskell gender give hand Hardy Hardy's heroine household husband imagination important independent individual influence Jane kind ladies land landscape language live London Lucy marriage married Mary material means Meredith Miss Moonstone moral narrative narrator nature never notes novel passion plot political possession present protected provincial question readers reform relations relationship representation represents resistance rhetoric romance seems sensation sense separate sexual Shirley single social society space story suggests things tion turns University Victorian Villette voice wife woman women writing York