Overview

Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and examines the methods their authors use to encourage reader empathy. This book also usefully demonstrates how to identify kept women when they are less visible in texts, including in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Dickens' Hard Times and Dombey and Son, and George Gissing's The Odd Women.

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9781526198211

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Readers and Mistresses is a valuable addition to criticism of the Victorian novel. It will be of interest to gender theorists and cultural historians as well as literary scholars, and fits perfectly into its series as one of Manchester’s ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century.’ Simon Cooke, Victorian Web -- .

'There is more to the kept woman than the conflicted figure in The Awakening Conscience, and Peel ensures that we see that figure in all of its complexity, and with fresh eyes.' — Simon Cooke, Victorian Web -- .

'there is more to the kept woman than the conflicted figure in The Awakening Conscience, and Peel ensures that we see that figure in all of its complexity, and with fresh eyes.' — Simon Cooke, Victorian Web -- .

'Readers and Mistresses is a valuable addition to criticism of the Victorian novel. It will be of interest to gender theorists and cultural historians as well as literary scholars, and fits perfectly into its series as one of Manchester’s ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century.’ — Simon Cooke, Victorian Web -- .

Author Information

Katie R. Peel is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington

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