Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home

by Monica Feinberg Cohen

• ISBN13: 9780521021180
• ISBN10: 0521021189
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism

2. Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette

3. Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity

4. Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home and the institutionalisation of form

5. Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt

6. A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda

Afterword.