To love or to write? This was the crucial question facing the major women writers oft he last century. The painful struggle between sexual relations and personal fulfillment as creative artists is constantly portrayed and re-enacted in their fiction. This book provides the first close analysis of the central struggle in the lives and writings of Victorian women authors. It demonstrates the inadequacy of attitudes formed by twentieth century sexual libertation for an understanding of feminism in Victorian writing. This study establishes a double tendency in Victorian feminism to favor love but equally to oppose it from a position of 'radical chastity'. This essential book at once articulates crucial feminist issues and also constitutes a majr statement on the sources of female creativity. -- Publisher description

The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction explores the representation of Victorian womanhood in the work of some of today's most important British and North American novelists including A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and Toni Morrison. By analysing these novels in the context of the scientific, religious and literary discourses that shaped Victorian ideas about gender, it contributes to an important inter-disciplinary debate. For while showing the power of these discourses to shape women's roles, the novels also suggest how individual women might challenge that power through their own lives.

To love or to write? This was the crucial question facing the major women writers oft he last century. The painful struggle between sexual relations and personal fulfillment as creative artists is constantly portrayed and re-enacted in their fiction. This book provides the first close analysis of the central struggle in the lives and writings of Victorian women authors. It demonstrates the inadequacy of attitudes formed by twentieth century sexual libertation for an understanding of feminism in Victorian writing. This study establishes a double tendency in Victorian feminism to favor love but equally to oppose it from a position of 'radical chastity'. This essential book at once articulates crucial feminist issues and also constitutes a majr statement on the sources of female creativity. -- Publisher description

The late-Victorian debate on marriage, motherhood and women's rights reflects the impact the women's movement had on the formation and transformation of public opinion. This comprehensive anthology contextualizes key feminist texts and ideas.

This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of 'the woman question' in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, 'Ouida' and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.