Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home

by Monica Feinberg Cohen

Overview

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. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521591416
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/05/1998
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #14
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.75(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism; 2. Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette; 3. Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity; 4. Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home and the institutionalisation of form; 5. Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt; 6. A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda; Afterword.

Editorial Reviews

"A book for large collections serving upper-division undergraduates through faculty." Choice

"In The Victorian Governess, Kathryn Hughes presents a comprehensive examination of the state of the profession at mid-century for those employed spinsters." Laurie Kaplan, JASNA News

"marvelous" Victorian Studies

From the Publisher