Literature & Literary Studies
Description
Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and examines the methods their authors use to encourage reader empathy. This book also usefully demonstrates how to identify kept women when they are less visible in texts. I look at primary women characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Dickens' Hard Times and Dombey and Son, and George Gissing's The Odd Women.
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Endorsements
Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature addresses the question of what to do when someone is invisible in both official documents and literature. Readers and mistresses studies the women who cannot be found in marriage registries, censuses, or much of mainstream, nineteenth-century British literature. Instead of considering kept mistresses as embodying one stage on the way to certain sex work and death, Peel uses the term 'kept woman' to unite women in a variety of kinds of keeping relationships, including some perceived as quite positive. In doing so, she offers a way to read that removes the stigma of the sexual, and appreciates the decisions of kept women as survival choices in a time and culture that actively disprivileges them. Using recent scholarship in empathy and carework, Peel takes a queer approach to Victorian narrative and encourages an active readership. Ultimately, this queer reading offers a path of reader engagement that centers the often illegible experience of kept women, and renders readers themselves the keepers of these women's narratives. Authors included in this study are, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Gissing. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.
Reviews
Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature addresses the question of what to do when someone is invisible in both official documents and literature. Readers and mistresses studies the women who cannot be found in marriage registries, censuses, or much of mainstream, nineteenth-century British literature. Instead of considering kept mistresses as embodying one stage on the way to certain sex work and death, Peel uses the term 'kept woman' to unite women in a variety of kinds of keeping relationships, including some perceived as quite positive. In doing so, she offers a way to read that removes the stigma of the sexual, and appreciates the decisions of kept women as survival choices in a time and culture that actively disprivileges them. Using recent scholarship in empathy and carework, Peel takes a queer approach to Victorian narrative and encourages an active readership. Ultimately, this queer reading offers a path of reader engagement that centers the often illegible experience of kept women, and renders readers themselves the keepers of these women's narratives. Authors included in this study are, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Gissing. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.
Author Biography
Katie R. Peel is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
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Manchester University Press
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View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Manchester University Press
- Publication Date October 2024
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781526176479 / 1526176475
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- FormatPrint PDF
- Pages256
- ReadershipGeneral/trade; College/higher education; Professional and scholarly
- Publish StatusPublished
- Dimensions216 X 138 mm
- Biblio NotesDerived from Proprietary 6177
- SeriesInterventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
- Reference Code16325
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