This book was first published in 1999. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of 'the woman question' in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, 'Ouida' and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.

First published in 1988. This study can be situated within the history of women, women’s education, women’s rights, sport, leisure and recreation. Its aim is not to establish or submit to review what is known or thought to be known about the Victorian world-view and woman’s place within it, but rather to investigate reactions against this view and the emergence of a counter-view through sport and exercise. An attempt is made to rescue the English sportswoman from the obscuring mists of the past, to discuss her as a transitional figure between opposing views of womanhood and to place her within the context of the general movement for the emancipation of women as an important effect and cause — without necessarily assuming what women’s status in sport and in society should have been.

This reader collects together articles by key historians, literary critics and anthropologists on the cultures of colonialism in the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is divided into three sections: theoretical, emphasizing approaches; the colonisers "at home"; and "away".

Demons of Domesticity offers a social history of the English gas industry from the 1880s to the late 1930s, with an emphasis on the corporations that served London and the Home Counties. It documents the hitherto unexamined role that women played in the development of the industry by considering two major interlocking themes: the expansion of sales occupations for women in the English gas industry, and the parallel growth and diversification of the industry's marketing strategies. During the late-nineteenth century, the home became the focal point for a number of debates concerning female employment and gender roles. As an increasing number of labour saving domestic devices came onto the market women found themselves targeted by manufacturing companies and utility suppliers, both as consumers and advocates. Foremost among these companies were representatives of the gas industry who actively addressed domestic issues. As the promoters, purveyors and consumers of domestic technology, Demons of Domesticity suggests that English female employees and consumers were not the hapless dupes of corporate marketing, but instead had clear ideas about how domestic technology could and should be used to reconfigure the public and private spaces of work and home.

Aimee Mayne was born into a life of apparent privilege and opportunity. However, as a woman born in 1872 and living through the first half of the twentieth century, these opportunities were severely limited by law, culture and tradition. This story is of a woman of the British upper-middle-class, whose life was full of colour – of living in India; of family relationships; of travel; of the Blitz. She kept diaries, and wrote an intimate memoir. This book explores her emotional conflicts, with a revealing analysis that includes revelations about a woman brought up in the late-Victorian period, encompassing her sex-life and the turmoil of an unhappy marriage. It is a study of a life that identifies how an upper-middle-class upbringing that included an attempted tertiary education, at a time when this was unheard of for most women, induced her into a marriage and life-style that was the antithesis of her early aspirations. Her life was to engender a sense of grievance that embittered relations with her family. While she took advantage of her travels to undertake a successful lecturing career, personal fulfilment was only to be found at the end of her life during the London Blitz in World War Two.

A cultural icon of the fin de siècle , the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins . The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in nineteenth-century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman.

Bringing together disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences, this Handbook presents novel and lively examinations of the dynamic ways religion, gender and sexuality operate. Applying feminist, intersectional, and reflexive approaches, the volume aims to loosen imperialist and exclusionary figurations that have underwritten and tethered religion, gender, and sexuality together. While holding onto the field of inquiry, the Handbook offers contributions that interrogate and untie it from the terms and conditions that have formed it. The volume is organized into thematic sections: - Forces and Futures - Activisms and Labors - Agencies and Practices - Relationships and Institutions - Texts and Objects Chapters range across religious, geographical, historical, political, and social contexts and feature an array of case-studies, experiences, and topics that exemplify the reflexive intention of the volume, including explorations of race, whiteness, colonialism, and the institutional intolerance of minority groups. Contributors also advance new areas of research in religion including artificial intelligence, farming, migrant mothering, child sexual abuse, mediatization, national security, legal frameworks, addiction and recovery, decolonial hermeneutics, creative arts, sport, sexual practices, and academic friendship. This is an essential contribution to the fields of religious studies and gender and sexuality studies.

During this period the realms of the public and the private became increasingly separated, with increasingly separate roles for men and women. Changes in cultural values concerning gender, ideals about family relationships, and ideas of the appropriate role women brought uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction. Anne Powell's life embodied this shift in values and provides an example of how they were carried from the old world to the new. A Life of Propriety makes an innovative contribution to the literature on women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and will also be of interest to scholars in women's studies, and early Ontario and Canadian history, as well as to the general reader. "Sets the story of the Powell family in the context of a growing international literature on gender and family relations in an important period of change ... a captivating story and a great read." Alison Prentice, Department of History and Philosophy, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Sexuality and Subordination uses the insights of a range of disciplines to examine the construction of gender in nineteenth-century Britain and France. With contributions from history, literature, sociology and philosophy, its interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the extent to which a common focus can illuminate problems inaccessible to any single discipline. 'Victorianism' is generally understood to mean sexual double standards, hypocrisy and prudery among the middle classes. But, as this collection shows, the representation of sexuality in the nineteenth century was more diverse and complex than is sometimes realized. Both art and literature point to the deployment of sexual metaphors and imagery, and the language of educated public opinion was shaped by the dichotomy between mind and matter, between rationality and sexuality. The contributors to this volume explore how women, in questioning their subordination, had to challenge a construction of femininity which imposed sexual ignorance.