Abstract
Friendship offered Victorian men and women much more than interpersonal intimacy. As a rallying cry (‘Come, my friends/ ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world’) or as a refuge from danger (‘there is no friend like a sister’), it provided practical, micro-solutions to many larger public problems. 1 As recent scholarship has demonstrated, friendship had social, economic, and political stakes: it was a practice ground for companionate marriage, an alternative to family or professional care, and the basis for both democracy and social activism.2 If men could secure such relationships through school, clubs, and professional associations, these friendships had particular significance for women, who had fewer institutional occasions to develop networks and alliances, and for whom they frequently took the place of more formal coalitions. The close friendships that Sharon Marcus has found to be ‘pervasive’ in the life writing of middle-class women fit comfortably within the norms of domestic ideology; considered ‘essential to proper femininity’, they appeared compatible with conventional, heteronormative family life. Yet they also challenged these conventions by providing alternative forms of connection and agency, enabling women ‘to exercise powers of choice and expression’.3 Though individual pleasure might motivate and reward close female ties, those ties could also be strategic, empowering, and efficacious.
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Notes
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ (1833), in Victorian Literature 1830–1900, ed. by Dorothy Mermin and Herbert F. Tucker (Philadelphia: Harcourt College Publishers, 2002), pp. 399–400, 11. 56–57
Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’ (1862), in Victorian Literature 1830–1900, pp. 846–52, 1. 562.
For the perception of female friendships as instrumental to heterosexual marriages, see Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially pp. 79, 84.
On working-class neighbourhood networks, see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 116, 178.
For the relationship of friendship to democracy, Richard Dellamora, Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 21–3 and passim;
for female alliances and social activism, see Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), passim and chapters 4–6.
Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 49.
For example, David Skilton, ‘“Depth of Portraiture”: What Should Distinguish a Victorian Man from a Victorian Woman?’ rpt. in The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Regenia Gagnier (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009), p. 218.
As Talia Schaffer notes, despite the fact that female characters in nineteenth-century novels work, ‘good work is both desperately wanted and extremely difficult to find [...]. Women are made to crave professional work from which they are perpetually thwarted’ (p. 18); see ‘Why You Can’t Forgive Her: Vocational Women and the Suppressive Hypothesis’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 128 (Fall 2015), 15–35.
Augusta Webster (1837–94), ‘A Castaway’, in Victorian Literature 1830–1900, pp. 938–45.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, A. H. H. (1850), ed. by Erik Gray (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), §56, 1. 15.
For the fraught friendships and rivalries of sisters in particular, see Helena Michie, Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 33–37 and passim
as well as Mary Ann O’Farrell, ‘Sister Acts’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 34:3/4 (Fall-Winter, 2006), 154–73.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. by Rosemary Ashton (1871; London: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 112 and 113 respectively.
For Gaskell’s navigation of married women’s property law in her purchase of a home, see Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, ‘Evolutionary Discourse and the Credit Economy in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 41:3 (2013), 487–501 (pp. 489–90).
Winifred Hughes, ‘Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and Modernity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. by Jill L. Matus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 90–107, 98.
Jennifer Panek, ‘Constructions of Masculinity in Adam Bede and Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Review: The Journal of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada and the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, 22:2 (Winter 1996), 127–51 (p. 128).
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, ed. by Pam Morris (1866; London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 320 and 393 respectively. All further references in parentheses in the text.
See Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 165.
Anna Unsworth, ‘Some Social Themes in Wives and Daughters, I: Education, Science, and Heredity’, Gaskell Society Journal, 4 (1990), 40–51 (p. 45).
See Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, Siblings without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012).
Anne DeWitt, ‘Moral Uses, Narrative Effects: Natural History in Victorian Periodicals and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 43:1 (Spring 2010), pp. 1–18, 3; see also Leighton and Surridge, Evolutionary Discourse, p. 498.
Karen Boiko, ‘Reading and (Re)Writing Class: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33:1 (2005), pp. 85–106, 94; also DeWitt, ‘Moral Uses’, p. 11; Lisieux Huelman, ‘The (Feminist) Epistemology of the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Professional Men in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 5:2 (2009), 35 paragraphs. Electronic publication,.
Mary Debrabant, ‘Birds, Bees and Darwinian Survival Strategies in Wives and Daughters’, Gaskell Society Journal, 16 (2002), pp. 14–29 (p. 17)
also Phoebe Poon, ‘Popular Evolutionism: Scientific, Legal and Literary Discourse in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters’, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Original Essays for the Bicentenary, ed. by Sandro Jung (Lebanon, NH: Academia, 2010), pp. 195–213, 196, 199, 202
Jim Endersby, ‘Sympathetic Science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, and the Passions of Victorian Naturalists’, Victorian Studies, 51:2 (2009), pp. 299–320 (p. 300).
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine & Atherton, Inc., 1972), p. 189.
See James Najarian, ‘“Mr. Osbourne’s Secret”: Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, and the Gender of Romanticism’, in Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era, ed. by Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 85–101 (p. 93). For Osborne’s resemblance to his mother and his socialisation to replace a deceased daughter, see Panek, ‘Constructions of Masculinity’, p. 146; for Roger as paternal, see Poon, ‘Popular Evolutionism’, p. 202.
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Rappoport, J. (2018). Friendship and Intimacy. In: Hartley, L. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1830–1880. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58465-6_18
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