Victorian women writers and the woman question

Аннотация

Women writers dominated the vast novel market in Victorian England. Yet from the hundreds of women novelists popularly and critically admired in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century critical conversations have revolved around the canonical few: George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte¨, and, more recently, Elizabeth Gaskell. Here I argue that Victorian women novelists’ inherently complicated and conflicted positions on the ‘‘woman question,’’ in conjunction with the evolving horizon of expectations toward what we now call feminism, are responsible for their noncanonical status.