An interdisciplinary approach to the study of women and property, combining literature, history, and economics. By looking at women's marriage narratives over a long period of time, the book reveals the deep discontent with the institution of property ownership as a unifying thread from the Middle Ages up through the twentieth-century.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Drawing from three disparate centuries and places and representing three distinct legal models of female ownership, this dissertation examines the ways in which women have written about marriage in the context of their ability or inability to own property in their own name. In two of these cases, women experienced a marked change in their fortunes. One was in twelfth-century France, where women generally lost the rights they once had both to own and to pass on their property. The other was in England, where the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 gave women legal ownership over their own property. In the third case, mid-nineteenth-century Russia, women had always owned land and serfs. I argue that when women can own property, their narratives differ remarkably from those of women who cannot.

Medieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God .

Did 19th-century American women have money of their own? To answer this question, Women, Money, and the Law looks at the public and private stories of individual women within the context of American culture, assessing how legal and cultural traditions affected women's lives, particularly with respect to class and racial differences, and analyzing the ways in which women were involved in economic matters. Joyce Warren has uncovered a vast, untapped archive of legal documents from the New York Supreme Court that had been expunged from the official record. By exploring hundreds of court cases involving women litigants between 1845 and 1875--women whose stories had, in effect, been erased from history--and by studying the lives and works of a wide selection of 19th-century women writers, Warren has found convincing evidence of women's involvement with money. The court cases show that in spite of the most egregious gender restrictions of law and custom, many 19th-century women lived independently, coping with the legal and economic restraints of their culture while making money for themselves and often for their families as well. They managed their lives and their money with courage and tenacity and fractured constructed gender identities by their lived experience. Many women writers, even when they did not publicly advocate economic independence for women, supported themselves and their families throughout their writing careers and in their fiction portrayed the importance of money in women's lives. Women from all backgrounds--some defeated through ignorance and placidity, others as ruthless and callous as the most hardened businessmen--were in fact very much a part of the money economy. Together, the evidence of the court cases and the writers runs counter to the official narrative, which scripted women as economically dependent and financially uninvolved. Warren provides an illuminating counternarrative that significantly questions contemporary assumptions about the lives of 19th-century women. Women, Money, and the Law is an important corrective to the traditional view and will fascinate scholars and students in women's studies, literary studies, and legal history as well as the general reader.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Gut, University of Vienna (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistk), language: English, abstract: Based on a variety of social and cultural confinements regarding the depiction of certain parts of the female body in literature, 19th century British novelists had to concentrate on those bodily attributes of women which were considered proper and decent to be displayed in writing. Answering the social rules prohibiting the public exhibition of female passions and feelings, such as sexual arousal, love or wrath, authors turned to methods of substituting the direct reference to those very emotions, thereby employing the parts of the female body they could with a clear conscience depict in their interpretations. This method of illustrating the female body in connection with women's emotional state is going to be discussed on the basis of Jane Austen's novels Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontё's Jane Eyre and the short novel Daisy Miller by Henry James. A prominent feature of 19th century literature, used to demonstrate the interdependency of mind and body, is illness. The body suffering from physical as well as mental diseases is frequently instrumentalized by novelists as a messenger delivering information about a person's emotional condition. Additionally, 19th century authors tend to use illness as a starting point for character and plot changes as well as romantic relationships between men and women, and refer to a character's sickness as his or her lawful punishment for improper conduct. One of the most important tools for novelists in revealing their characters' thoughts and emotions is the female complexion. Frequently subject to blushing or turning pale, the female face functions as an apt communicator of a woman's mind and heart. A blush can uncover a character's romantic affections, embarrassment, guilty conscience, exciteme

Female Subjectivity in African American Women s Narratives of Enslavement is a new and innovative study of black women s transformation, which focuses on black women writers who support the notion of separate location for a changed female consciousness. This book offers the concept of the "Transient Woman" as a new paradigm and feminist vision for analyzing female subjectivity and consciousness.