Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 14)

ISBN: 0521591414

Author: Cohen, Monica Feinberg

Condition: New

Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bront, 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.