Giving Women Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture

by Rappoport, Jill

• ISBN13: 9780199772605
• ISBN10: 0199772606
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Womenexamines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

Author Biography

Jill Rappoport is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Women Giving

Gifts of Writing

Organization of the Book

Balanced Accounts

Literary Offerings

Benevolent Books, Receptive Readers

Gifts of Freedom

Alliance and Exchange

Fictions of Reciprocity in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh

Jane's Inheritance

"An[other] Undowered Orphanö

Blind Economies

Conservation in Cranford: Sympathy, Secrets, and the First Law of Thermodynamics

The Science of Giving

Secrets in Circulation

Much Obliged

The Price of Redemption in "Goblin Markeö

Sisterhood "Beyond the Reach of Any Remunerationö

Lizzie's Silver Penny

The Safest Investments

Cupboards, Chairs, and Conversion

"Coming Down" in order to Rise Up: Risk and Asset

Writing the Slums

Bio-Altruism

The Sacrifice of Motherhood

Dying for the Vote

A Politics of Generosity

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