Victorian Women Writers

George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss, like Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, draws on the example of physiology to explore and represent the relation of the individual to her social environment. Nearly a century before Bakhtin wrote his influential theory of the grotesque, George Eliot drew on the work of her common-law husband (and amateur physiologist) George Henry Lewes in writing her Bildungsroman, especially his two-part Fraser's Magazine Essay "Dwarfs and Giants" and his book The Physiology of Common Life. Lewes' speculations concerning both legendary and physiological dwarves and giants in his Fraser's essay reappear figuratively in The Mill on the Floss, and inform Eliot's representations of Maggie, Tom and Philip.

The Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets rejected contemporary conventional style in art, and did not concern themselves with the representation of contemporary life either. They viewed the surrounding social life as sordid, and reached back to the Middle Ages both for technique and subject matter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and later William Morris found inspiration in late medieval art and literature. They took their subjects from history, legend, religion or poetry, focusing on moral or psychological issues, and expressed fascination for beauty as a value of spiritual nature. This paper examines three of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's medieval fantasy pictures (The Tune of Seven Towers, The Blue Closet and A Christmas Carol), which prompt a meditative and imaginative response through their enigmatic references, and thus attest the mysterious feature of Pre-Raphaelite medieval imagery. The paper discusses their enigmatic nature in the light of William Morris's early dream poems The Tune of Seven Towers and The Blue Closet, written on the relevant Rossetti pictures. A parallel reading of poem and picture evidences how Pre-Raphaelite medievalism in painting can invite the onlooker for an inner journey through exploring an imagined referential background.

American expatriate scholar, Mary Berenson (née Whitall Smith) (Fig. 1), collaborated with her second husband, the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, in creating a foundational canon for the field of Italian Renaissance painting with their attributional lists.

'A Beleaguered City: Being a Narrative of Certain Recent Events in the City of Semur, in the Department of the Haute Bourgogne: A Story of the Seen and the Unseen' (1880) is considered to be Margaret Oliphant’s first excursion into the field of supernatural tales. This ghost story builds up on successive narrative voices that variously narrate how a French city is invaded by spirits, not working evil but seeking to convert the people from their worldly materialism. Among sharply individualized responses, in general the prosperous and the men are horrified and outraged, while the poor and the women welcome the visitations. A shift toward human perception and dignity of life is suggested through the tale.

This research proposes to show how the class distinction in Victorian Age takes place in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel " Mary Barton ". First of all, it's aimed to analyze how was the social and economic events emerged through the industrialization in England. It's observed that the novel reflects both upper class and working-class people's social life. Much of the working-class population were living in poverty and they tried to announce their voice with the Chartist Movement. Then, to indicate the effects of the values and norms, ethics, class and gender relations which observed

In the 1880s and 1890s, New Woman writers changed the face of British society and British fiction through their sexually open works, which critiqued old notions of marriage, and through their stylistic experimentation, which announced the modernist novel. New Woman scholarship has often studied their work in connection with that of French feminists of the late twentieth century, such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. This article reconsiders the nature of this connection through a close examination of novels by two of the most popular New Woman authors, Mona Caird (1854–1932) and Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). I read Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) through the lens of Hélène Cixous’s theories of écriture féminine, or feminine writing, to question the accusation of biological determinism which is frequently directed at both groups of writers. By applying Cixous’s notions of feminine aesthetics, bisexuality, and alterity to Caird and Schreiner, my study provides the basis for a new understanding of their novels. More generally, it complements and qualifies the connection between the New Woman and so-called French feminism, thereby helping produce a more complex framework to study the fin de siècle.

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

When the category of ‘Sensation Fiction’ was first applied as a genre label in the Literary Budget periodical of November 1861, it coined a term for a new species of narrative that was at once innovative, soon-to-be hugely influential, and at the same time the next logical step in a long literary tradition. Much like the opening scene of a bestselling novel, something had happened, was happening, and was going to happen. In publishing terms, the ‘hook’ had been well and truly set, addicting and titillating readers with a chain of withheld secrets and startling revelations. As the name suggests, these books were intended to excite the senses, piling shock after naked shock.

For readers, who were overwhelmingly in favour, and critics, who were not, the concept of the ‘novel of sensation’ coalesced around three English authors. The serialisation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White in Dickens’ All The Year Round from 1859 to 1860 (and its subsequent publication as a novel) had quite literally caused a sensation, with readers desperate for the next instalment besieging booksellers. All manner of unlicensed merchandise quickly followed, as well as fashion lines inspired by central characters and even themed tea-rooms. Ellen (‘Mrs. Henry’) Wood’s East Lynne (1861) – a tale of seduction, infidelity, dual identities and murder – was similarly popular and trailblazing, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon, already active in the genre with novels such as Three Times Dead (1860), was shortly to begin her breakthrough serial and masterpiece, Lady Audley’s Secret...

The Brontë Sisters 200 Years: Biographical and Fictional Universes

Volume (to commemorate Brontë 200) on the reception, translation of the Brontë  sisters's work in Portugal, and on the biographical and fictional universes of the authors.
Published by the Portuguese National Library.

(Updated July 23, 2019) Since the time of Dr. Fred Veltman's eight-year study, "The Life of Christ Research Project," questions have remained regarding Ellen White's denial of literary use. Dr. Veltman's voicing of these questions in the MINISTRY summary of the project left many readers with a misperception about Ellen White. Also, Ron Numbers' PROPHETESS OF HEALTH raised asserted that Adventists already had the main outlines of health reform before Ellen White's June 1863 health vision. This chapter, extracted from WHITE LIE SOAP addressed Numbers' assertion, demonstrating that it was Ellen White's vision that enlisted Adventists to take care of their health and showing that Ellen White's denials were specific answers to questions given her rather than blanket denials of literary adaptation.

In Romola (1862) George Eliot investigates the complex interplay between the female self and the surrounding cultural stifling milieu to explore the limitations and possibilities of femininity in Renaissance Florence. The author vests the eponymous heroine with an urgent desire to overthrow the socio-political structures founded on male patriarchal values, dominant in Florence and unfitting to accommodate women’s talents, thus echoing the debate about women’s place in mid-Victorian androcentric society. Romola’s aspiration to moral freedom, a vocation alternative to marriage and childbearing, and to an intellectual autonomy unmolested by a long-established patriarchal system, is crushed by the burden of family traditions, past obligations and social responsibilities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to examine the evolution of the heroine’s character through her spiritual journey (which echoes Eliot’s own religious struggle) and to show her triumph over the egotism inherited fr...

Review on Hoeveler's "Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës" (1998), a work which explores the notion that she labelled as "gothic feminism" while analysing several novels by female gothic writers.

This article examines the Victorian chatelaine, a rarely investigated accessory with a function that has been attributed to the lack of pockets in Victorian women's clothing. Whereas previous study into the chatelaine has concentrated on design and material culture, this article explores perceptions and representations of the chatelaine. A textual and visual analysis of literary and photographic representations of the chatelaine considers how the accessory functioned to expose women's possessions to the male gaze, and regulated femininity via unique gesticulations and appended tools.
Multiple conflicting qualities emerge, portraying the chatelaine as an aid to domesticity
and femininity, and as a flirtatious novelty central to interactions with the opposite sex.
Adopted by women of all ages, the chatelaine served a variety of functions, providing
women with the means to display and enact their domesticity, femininity, and
fashionability whilst engendering an emotional supportive role through its tactile
materiality.

The Shakespearean fair Ophelia has become through the centuries a
multi faceted heroine apt to embody all the victims of patriarchal domination, but
also the evil and victimized decadent lady, who would annihilate her tormentor.
Similar oxymoronic identifications were possible partly because of the vagueness that
distinguishes her character in the Shakespearean tragedy, and partly because of the
fluctuating status of adolescent girls in society. Moreover, the contemporary reception
of Ophelia has strongly been biased by the treatment of this literary myth by the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In the Victorian era, when issues about the condition,
the power, and the rights of women were raised with particular force, Ophelia soon
became an icon of sublime but dangerous beauty. Such an association even came to
the point that Elizabeth Siddal – poet, painter, and model of Millais’s Ophelia – was
identified with the Shakespearean heroine, by virtue of her unquenchable thirst for
knowledge, her unrequited love, her prettiness, and the torture she allegedly provoked
to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s conscience.

In conclusion, the effects of class differences can be seen throughout the whole novel with characterizations and plot arrangement just as it affected the Victorian era. His language and characters both made him the most popular writer of the Victorian age and his books are still popular all around the world. Owing to his plot and character development in Great Expectations, he portrays the dark side and negative aspects of class difference in addition to his experiences that occurred during his childhood like deprival of education. Furthermore, he depicts the reversing relationships between people on account of class differences. Hence, his novel mirrors the changing status of people due to social classes and shows the power of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England.

Christina Rossetti’s poem, Goblin Market, has been the subject of critical debate since its first publication in 1862. Any interpretation of Goblin Market appears to be plausible, but no one single reading successfully becomes the ‘one right total meaning’ of the text. For instance, Gilbert and Gubar combine feminist and psycho-analytical readings of the text, alluding briefly to the sexual and religious meanings, but completely overlooking its Marxist and queer implications. In an authoritative tone they state, ‘Obviously the conscious or semi-conscious allegorical intention of this narrative poem is sexual/religious.’  Helsinger, on the other hand, mainly concentrates on ‘women’s relation’ to the ‘male marketplace’ without being drawn to any of the religious references in Laura’s temptation, the sexual and queer imagery used in depicting the sisters’ solidarity, or the uncanny nature of the goblins.  Even Campbell’s ambitious attempt at a feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic reading falls short of recognizing any religious or sexual value to the poem.  I argue in the present paper that a psycho-analytic reading of Rossetti’s Goblin Market could successfully sustain itself, combining elements of Marxist, feminist, religious, sexual and queer readings under the banner of the unconscious.

This article will consider depictions of two different mythical women in the Victorian period, namely the characters of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and the Jewish folkloric figure of Lilith. It will consider different interpretations of such mythical women by comparing John Singer Sargent’s Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889) with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Body’s Beauty’ (c.1866-8). It will argue that Sargent creates a myth of womanhood in the character of Lady Macbeth via his portrait of Ellen Terry, largely inspired by her costume. It will compare this to the legend of Lilith as an alternative female myth; as that myth is expressed in Rossetti’s sonnet. The article will argue that these two artefacts depict differing interpretations of mythical women as versions of the femme fatale in the context of increased female self-expression and autonomy in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Many nineteenth-century ghost-story writers focused on the haunted house, but these stories mainly concern themselves with the fear, danger, and near-escapes experienced by the people who spend time in the houses. The ghosts are usually pure evil, grotesquely described, and often seek to physically harm their visitors. Other authors during this period, however (and particularly women writers), chose to center their supernatural stories on connections between the ghosts in these houses and the living characters that dwell in them. These ‘relationships’ usually bring about a change in the way in which the house is haunted. For instance, the ghosts are less troubled after they are able to communicate a message to the living which enables a change to take place, namely stories of found wills, recovered inheritances, and reconnecting to loved ones who are still alive. In these stories, the living characters who encounter the ghosts also experience some kind of change or improvement. Often, the characters profit financially in respect to found treasure of some sort, or the characters profit emotionally, whereby their time in these houses leads to a greater sympathy for the deceased person or an awareness of their own shortcomings and prejudices in life.

Women writers of the supernatural frequently used the motif of the haunted house to comment on property, class, and economic issues. In many of their stories, these ‘uncomfortable houses’, as they were popularly called at the time, are troubled because of some injustice or social inequality that left the past inhabitants seeking help from the current owners of the properties.

Indeed, through the presence of the ghosts, the very ‘ownership’ of the properties is questioned. Often,as in Charlotte Riddell’s ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’ from her collection, Weird Stories (1882), the troubled past comes to the knowledge of the present inhabitant in the form of a dream vision, visions which ultimately turn out to be quite real to the people who must deal with the ghosts. These dreams also lead to tangible results because by the end of the stories, the main characters have learned to change their present ways by taking more responsibility for their actions, and some characters actually find happy endings, as is the case in Riddell’s ‘Walnut-Tree House’. This idea alone makes women’s stories of haunted houses something different from their male counterparts, whereas in most stories by men, the apparition doing the haunting is malevolent and, in many cases, successfully drives the visitors or tenants out of the house by terrifying them with frightening visions, or even physical harm. Likewise, their presence in these houses and the traumas that led to their unhappy afterlives are usually never fully understood by readers. The added element of psychological appeasement that is such a part of ghost stories by women can be seen in both Riddell’s and Oliphant’s stories. For instance,in Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’, originally published in
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1882, the haunted property comes to the attention of the current owners through mysterious voices and moving shades which reside near certain parts of the house or grounds, parts which represent some past trauma for the former inhabitants. This trauma leads to reconciliation and a greater understanding between the living and the dead by the end of the story.

The stories in this article each highlight the interest of the authors not simply to scare, but to teach readers lessons beyond the narrative. More so than their male counterparts, female authors increasingly turned to the ghost story as a way to critique the economic problems in both the impoverished streets and wealthy ancestral homes of England, as well as to shine a light on the emotional grievances existing behind closed doors. Issues of economic and social inequality arise just as frequently as the ghosts in these stories. Their troubled houses expanded the traditional idea of the haunted house as a place of fear and made it into something more meaningful,a place not only where fear resides but also where there is the potential for individual awareness, as well as mutual understanding that transcends the boundaries between life and death.

'Impure researches' are those that mix methodologies and types of data, and in particular remind readers that reading is an impure bodily as well as mental experience. The article argues that if we neglect how our perception of the material format of a text affects our understanding, we stand to risk being blind to how a text comprises the ever increasing sum of the history of its sensuous presentation and perception. It takes as a case study the publication history of Ouida's most popular short story, «A Dog of Flanders» (1871). The story has uniformly been defined as a children's story from the late twentieth century onwards, yet this labelling is a result of marketing decisions that arose in the 1890s which affected the material format the story appeared in and thereafter the interpretative choices of critics and readers in general. By polluting both literary and book history through my own corporeal encounters with various material forms of this text, I am seeking to exemplify, in an iterable, practical way, claims by feminist and queer critics whose «return to the body» risks at times appearing immaterial and generic. Where does aesthetic literary impurity lie? Is it somehow 'in' the literary text, perhaps as a message or code that seeks to demarcate or query a boundary that determines the difference between good and bad taste, the disinterested and interested, commerce and art, dirty and clean? Might we regard impurity as the melding of distinct genres or discourses to various degrees, or the grafting of one onto another with various levels of ease or tension? The answer is yes to all of these of course. But we can also think of aesthetic attention to impurity as a methodological procedure. In a good deal of literary studies, attention to our perception of the material signs which comprise a text – the aesthesis of a text – still remains a devalued or circumscribed mode of enquiry. In its interpretative procedures, words are treated by close reading, for instance, as insubstantial abstract units regardless of their physical format. «History of the Book», where we may expect attention to the materiality of textual objects, has largely split off from literature to become a separate discipline and has sought to carve itself out a distinct niche by focussing on quantitative business history

Victorians' engagement with the past permitted a means by which they could express, and reconcile themselves with, the emerging idea of the modern. Developments in sound technologies (namely, Edison's phonograph) created new ways of preserving the past and reviving it for the present moment. Edison's machine, first demonstrated in 1877, inaugurated a new method of recording history and preserving both personal and national memory. Initially proposed as a technology for dictation and as a secretarial aid, the phonograph became a multisensory index for memorialising Victorian culture for future generations. It therefore created a tension between old and new, and implied a rupture in understandings of chronological time and memory. The phonograph allowed for the physical and auditory containment of what had hitherto been psychological or visually recorded. Recognising the phonograph as a tactile embodiment of history and an aural record of the disembodied voice, Victorians viewed the machine as an uncanny vessel that defamiliarised ideas of time. In this essay, I argue that Victorians expressed, and came to terms with, modernity through an active engagement with the past. In particular, this expression is achieved through a conscious historicising of the present moment. In my chosen texts, Florence McLandburgh's 'The Automaton Ear', Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Japanned Box', and Rudyard Kipling's 'The Finest Story in the World', the 'talking machines' become symbolic of the Victorians' attempts to archive the ancient and recent past, presenting a friction between technological advancement and the present creation of a historical relic. 1 Florence McLandburgh's 'The Automaton Ear' (1876) is concerned with what Pamela Thurschwell describes as the 'technological resuscitation' of sound. 2 Relenting that 'some individuals can distinguish sounds which to others […] would be wholly lost', 3 the narrator proposes the invention of 'an instrument which could catch these faint tones vibrating in the air and make them audible' (pp. 1-2). Like the

Jane Eyre astonished critics upon its publication in October of 1847. It was an exceptional artistic achievement during a tumultuous decade that saw the exposure of child labor and poor working conditions, revelations that led to the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 and the Chartist demonstrations of 1848. The mythic Jane Eyre seems to stand apart from this troubled political climate, yet it is very much a product of its revolutionary time: it is at once one of the last expressions of Romanticism and one of the first Victorian explorations of psychological depth; it imbues worn Gothic figures with new significance and it deploys the narrative of Christian redemption for secular, proto-feminist ends; it prefigures the sensation novel and anticipates themes women writers would return to for the next century and a half. In short, it fashions out of the past a language for the future.  The novel has remained in print continuously since its original publication, a testament to its enduring relevance to both critics and readers alike. It has been adapted numerous times for film, television, radio, and the stage; other writers have penned prequels, sequels, and revisions through the eyes of other characters, and writers of romance and young adult literature have offered readers thousands of permutations of the Jane/Rochester dynamic, from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

This Article works as an Islamic perspective and critique on the constructed idea of marriage in the 19th century through the dissection of Emily Dickinson’s poem, I am “wife”- I’ve finished that. The paper serves to identify the hierarchy and regulations of marriage within the Islamic paradigm, and address issues related to women’s rights and liberty.

The aim of this essay is to give an account of the nature and impact of the third-person narrator as in Nineteenth-Century English literature. Through the analysis of Jane Austen's 'Persuasion' (1818) and Elizabeth Gaskell's 'North and South' (1855) it will be examined how an intelligent manipulation of this narrative technique can lead to new experimental forms of expression in novels. Taking advantage of Seymour Chatman's approach in 'Story and Discourse' (1978) the essay examines the structural features of the third-person narrator in the two texts, and how those features merge with other textual elements to communicate something new. While in 'Persuasion' the female heroine struggles between the analysis of social issues and, at the same time, the aim towards romantic-poetic forms of imagination, in 'North and South' there is a study of the causal relationships between the characters' psyches and their social ideologies. The essay ultimately addresses some major theoretical implications about this type of narratological analysis.

Victorian literature not infrequently reveals the fragility of this coveted social order. For instance, in Braddon’s sensation novel, Aurora Floyd (1863), the ‘uncontaminated’ middle-class domestic haven is threatened by the very heroine, depicted as a mysterious femme fatale, and therefore the epitome of the ‘improper’ feminine. On the contrary, in Riddell’s City novel, The Race for Wealth (1866), the (il)legitimate capitalist activities of the male protagonist, Lawrence Barbour, are seemingly counterbalanced by Olivine Sondes, a paragon of  innocence and domestic virtue ; but no matter how hard she strives to protect from pollution “the very citadel of her purity”, she fails “ to shake the dust and dirt of London off”. Evidently, both Olivine and Aurora are meant to ‘cross the line’ at the root of the Victorian separation of ‘spheres’, calling into question the ‘naturalness’ of the domestic ideology, as well as the Victorian ideal of angelic femininity, and starting out a personal evolution in opposite directions. Given the above, in this paper I intend to outline the similarities, and the dissimilarities, of their roads to (im)pure womanhood.

José Ortega y Gasset in his 1925 essay entitled 'The Dehumanization of Art' explains
how the untrained eye, which is used to seeing only content in traditional forms of
expression, must find a new approach to viewing the work of art. He warns that the
study of art from the sociological point of view might at first seem a barren theme,
which he brilliantly compares to 'studying a man from his shadow'. My article shall
endeavour to intrude into this sphere of shadows by a reading of Mrs. Oliphant's
supernatural novella 'A Beleaguered City' (1880) as a testament of Gothic
Materialism, intending to propose a scheme of representation wherein the
unscreened real is projected through matter-in-itself.
Gasset proceeds to discover that the human contents of our daily lives possess a
hierarchy of three ranks. First comes the order of persons, then that of other living
creatures, and finally, that of inorganic things. It is this third category, then, in which
Mrs. Oliphant infuses a certain transcendental materialism. In an age when man was
apprehensive of the social world being reduced to a display window behind which
people, their actions, and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites
of others and, graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities is to affect
the beliefs of individual and social experience, Mrs. Oliphant centres her subject as
escaping the bounds of its material genesis. The material world in her Tales of the
Seen and the Unseen becomes a medium for the expression of the immaterial souls.
She posits the pure object of a thought within the experiences of sensory perceptions
and proceeds to create a sociology of the supernatural.
My paper shall put forward a frame of reference to the signification of the material
world as an embodiment of the incorporeal in Mrs. Oliphant's 'A Beleaguered City'
and offer insights into the handling of the form itself. Tagging along the pictorial
analogy in the literature of the nineteenth century, the article will look into the visual
of the visionary wherein material things are infused with a quality of insight which
reveals the inner spirit or symbolic life of the object.

Kate Chopin’s Edna, in that sense, was a mere representation of the solitude of an antithetical independence, who endeavored to build up a new sense of independent female identity and who released herself from the responsibilities by denying being a “mother-woman” (12) in search of freedom.

Haltrin-Khalturina, Elena V. “Aurora Leigh by Barrett Browning as a Landmark of Victorian Literature” In Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Studies in Language and Literature. Vol. 76, No. 6, 2017. Pp. 41-46. ISSN: 0321-1711. (In Russian).

В статье освещается, каким образом в известной поэме викторианской эпохи “Аврора Ли” (1856) преломились традиции романтической автобиографии и викторианского романа. Уделено внимание особенностям викторианского мировосприятия и викторианской литературы. Приводится характеристика “литературных эпифаний”, встречающихся в “Авроре Ли”, которые являют собой викторианский аналог вордсвортовских “мест времени” из поэмы “Прелюдия” (1805/1850).
Ключевые слова: творческая автобиография, профессия поэтессы, романтическая и викторианская психология творчества, “эпифании”, “двойные моменты видения”, “коллективные видения”, Э. Баррет-Браунинг, Ш. Бронте, У. Вордсворт, В. Вулф

The article looks at the traditions of Romantic autobiography and the Victorian novel, which were picked up and rethought by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1856). We touch upon the Victorian agenda and characteristic features of the Victorian literature. Special attention is paid to literary epiphanies present in Aurora Leigh (in particular, Aurora’s vision of Miriam and the moment of “double vision” in the finale), which offer a Victorian take on Wordsworth’s “spots of time”.
Key words: artistic autobiography, professional poetess, Romantic and Victorian psychology of creativity, epiphanies, moments of “double vision”, “shared epiphanies”, E. Barrett Browning, Ch. Brontë, W. Wordsworth, V. Woolf.

Marie Corelli was a powerful voice in the push-back against the Victorian crisis of faith after Darwin. She was a best selling novelist read by everyone from Queen Victoria to scullery maids, and at one time, out sold Dickens. Her anti-materialism message reached a wide audience through her novels. She critiqued everyone from Huxley to Blavatsky, and created her own brand of Christian-spiritualism with a science fiction spin. She was fascinated by the new science and at the same time, fundamentally threatened by it. Her novels do not hold up well as literature, but as cultural statements, they are important.

This comprehensive volume explores the literary landscape of Victorian women writers, shedding light on their profound impact on literature, feminism, and cultural history. Through meticulous analysis and scholarly inquiry, the book navigates the intricate narratives penned by these pioneering authors, uncovering layers of social critique, feminist consciousness, and cultural significance embedded within their works.
From the iconic novels of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot to the radical essays of Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's epic poem "Aurora Leigh," the volume traverses a diverse array of texts that challenge traditional gender norms, interrogate power dynamics, and advocate for women's rights. Each chapter offers close readings and insightful analyses of selected works, drawing connections between individual writers and broader feminist discourse.
Moreover, the book situates Victorian women writers within the broader intellectual landscape, exploring their intersections with gender studies, cultural studies, and feminist theory. By contextualizing their works within the social, political, and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, scholars illuminate the ways in which these authors navigated and negotiated the complexities of their time.
Throughout the volume, the legacy of Victorian women writers emerges as a beacon of inspiration and empowerment, challenging readers to rethink traditional narratives and embrace more inclusive perspectives. Their voices, once marginalized and overlooked, now occupy a central place in our academic discourse, shaping our understanding of the past and informing our vision for the future.
In sum, this volume offers a compelling exploration of Victorian women writers and their enduring influence, inviting readers to engage with their works with scholarly appreciation and academic rigor. Through continued research, analysis, and critical engagement, we can ensure that their voices resonate far beyond the confines of the Victorian era, enriching our understanding of literature, feminism, and cultural history for generations to come.

This essay situates Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette, along with her letters and unpublished poetry, within the nineteenth-century discourse of phrenology and moral management, exposing her ultimate critique of these popular theories as devices of power.  Deriving from faculty psychology, both hinged upon self-regulation as a moral necessity, determined by the decipherability of the self.  Brontë resisted this established relation between legibility and self-regulation, preferring a theory predicated upon her own developing concept of illegibility -- a potentially limitless imaginative space.  The majority of psychologists commonly associated any state of imaginative withdrawal with a lack of inner regulation and moral weakness leading to immorality and insanity.  Brontë’s work shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and becomes ultimately devastating to the self, advocating instead the moral basis of a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.

http://studiesinthenovel.org/read/current-issue.html

Research in the twenty-first century has claimed Victorian women’s magazines as one of the key channels to establish the ideology of domesticity typical of the mid-1800s, and Jane Austen as the publicly acceptable model of the woman writer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet representations of Austen in late Victorian women’s periodicals have received no scholarly attention. My paper addresses this gap: it focuses on The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, The Girl’s Own Paper and The Women’s Penny Paper. It argues that, by reiterating and departing from the biographical discourses of the Austen family in their depiction of the novelist, these periodicals transform Jane Austen into the realm where battles over definitions of female identity were taking place in the 1880s and 1890s.