Abstract
When the young actress, Elizabeth Robins, came to London in late 1888, her father was concerned for her safety during her ‘wanderings about the modern Babylon’ and considered that in London the ‘hours and places of danger’ were more numerous ‘than in New York’.1 Over a hundred years later, my own mother expressed similar concerns when I told her I wanted to study in London. She suggested I enrol in a women’s self-defence class she had seen advertised on television.
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Notes
Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862–1952 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 75.
Stevie Davies, ‘Introduction’, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. viii–xxx
Andrew Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 22.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles; A Pure Woman (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), p. 69.
Alfred Chichele Plowden, Grain or Chaff? The Autobiography of a Police Magistrate (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 34.
Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 9.
Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, 1840–1900, (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).
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© 2012 Emelyne Godfrey
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Godfrey, E. (2012). Introduction. In: Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284563_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284563_1
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