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 37
... passage of description in a novel , to sense the abundance and oppressiveness of a famously cluttered age . In The Victorian Treasure - House ( 1973 ) , Peter Conrad elicits some- thing of this ponderousness when he pieces together a ...
... passage of description in a novel , to sense the abundance and oppressiveness of a famously cluttered age . In The Victorian Treasure - House ( 1973 ) , Peter Conrad elicits some- thing of this ponderousness when he pieces together a ...
Page 57
... passage through a world with which she is at odds , giving preference to an idiom of self- narration , or self - creation , in which she is not fluent . She tentatively plots the sites at which plot itself breaks down , fearing to lose ...
... passage through a world with which she is at odds , giving preference to an idiom of self- narration , or self - creation , in which she is not fluent . She tentatively plots the sites at which plot itself breaks down , fearing to lose ...
Page 60
... passage ' ( p.640 ) . Lucy is left , during these intervals , to manage with only the resources of her own consciousness , a painfully difficult and recurrent exile . It is itself a kind of allée défendue to which she must retreat ...
... passage ' ( p.640 ) . Lucy is left , during these intervals , to manage with only the resources of her own consciousness , a painfully difficult and recurrent exile . It is itself a kind of allée défendue to which she must retreat ...
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argues Barbara Bodichon becomes Betteredge Bretton Brontë Caroline Celt chapter character Chartism Collins Collins's comedy comic conflict conventional coverture Cranford Cranfordians critical Crossways culture Diana divorce domestic earnings Elizabeth Gaskell England English female feminine feminist figure Gaskell Gaskell's gender George Meredith Gillian Beer Hardy Hardy's Helstone heroine heroine's Hintock household husband ideology imagination imperial independent Irish Jane Eyre Jude Jude the Obscure Jude's ladies land landscape language live London Lucy Lucy's marriage married women's property Mary Meredith middle-class mistress Moonstone moral narrative narrator nature passion plot political possession property reform provincial question Rachel readers realism Redworth relations relationship representation represents resistance rhetoric romance scene sensation novel sexual Shirley Shirley's social social realism society space sphere story struggle suggests things tion Verinder Victorian novel Villette voice Wessex widow wife wives woman of property women Woodlanders writing