Abstract
The Introduction outlines the ways in which the volume’s 16 original chapters reveal innovations and continuities in Victorian women’s writing of the 1840s and 1850s. Historically and culturally contextualizing female authorship within these two distinct decades, it discusses how women’s fiction challenged discourses of realism, sensation, and the new, and of middle-class gender ideology and cultural norms. It reveals that women’s writing of the 1840s was concerned with both individual mobility and social exclusion, while female-authored fiction of the 1850s paid attention to the lives of single women, masculinity, and the impediments of marriage. It also outlines the content of the volume’s chapters which confirm that the assumption of stability and the threat of change are not mutually exclusive in mid-nineteenth-century texts.
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Notes
- 1.
Most of Grace Aguilar’s fiction was also posthumously published in the 1850s.
- 2.
Such novels include works by George Sand in France, and Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe in America. Indeed, as Kathleen Tillotson observes in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850, published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell) and Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) also began the ‘great invasion of the English public by the American novel’ (6).
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Gavin, A.E., de la L. Oulton, C.W. (2018). Introduction. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_1
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