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.

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

Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk argues that women writers of the neo-Victorian novel are far more philosophical in their approach to representing the erotic than male writers and draw more heavily on Victorian conventions that would proscribe the graphic depiction of sexual acts, thus leaving more to the reader’s imagination. This book addresses the following questions: Why are women writers drawn to the neo-Victorian genre and what does this reveal about the state of contemporary feminism? How do classical and contemporary forms of the erotic play into the ways in which women writers address the Victorian “woman question”? How exactly is the erotic used to underscore women’s creative potential?

The origins of discrimination against women date back to ancient times. Throughout history, women have been exploited sexually, physically, economically, and socially under the shadow of patriarchal doctrines. Religion, tradition and the codes of morality have been misused to ensure the slavery of women. Although today the social and economic status of women is better than it was in the past, they are still the primary victims of abuse, humiliation, violence, and oppression. The Victorian era is one of the most debated periods in history of womanly struggle against discrimination. While it was considered an age of progress and prosperity, it was a time of misery and poverty as well. Victorian England was one of the hottest spots of the Woman Question. At the time, women were forced to lead a passive existence dictated by the norms of Victorian gender ideology. Transformations in science and technology during this period were contradictory to social beliefs and values. Despite the astonishing progress experienced during this period, the rigidly defined roles of men and women in Victorian society remained almost the same until the beginning of twentieth century. Victorian literature on gender flourished in such a tense atmosphere. Female rebellion against the injustices of this developing world often found its voices among the ones who were able to feel the deep sorrow experienced either by themselves or by the members of their gender. This book explores Victorian gender issues and the role of Victorian literature on the womanly journey towards emancipation through their evolutionary path. The key concepts and movements that shaped the historical, social, and political background of women's cry for their rights are examined along with the accompanying gender literature mainly through a feminist reading of female writers as regards to the Woman Question.

This book is about how ‘The Woman Question’ was represented in works of fiction published between 1850 and 1930. The essays here offer a wide-ranging and original approach to the ways in which literature shaped perceptions of the roles and position of women in society. Debates over ‘The Woman Question’ encompassed not only the struggle for voting rights, but gender equality more widely. The book reaches beyond the usual canonical texts to focus on writers who have, in the main, attracted relatively little critical attention in recent years: Stella Benson, Kate Chopin, Marie Corelli, Dinah Mulock Craik, Clemence Dane, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, Ouida, and William Hale White (who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Mark Rutherford’). These writers dealt imaginatively with issues such as marriage, motherhood, sexual desire, adultery and suffrage, and they represented female characters who, in varying degrees and with mixed success, sought to defy the social, sexual and political constraints placed upon them. The collection as a whole demonstrates how fiction could contribute in striking and memorable ways to debates over gender equality—debates which continue to have relevance in the twenty-first century.

Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.