Overview

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture. It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she, unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of social classes. Michie explores how novelists of the period captured with particular vividness England's ambivalent emotional responses to its own financial successes and engaged questions identical to those raised by political economists and moral philosophers. Each chapter reads a novelist alongside a contemporary thinker, tracing the development of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the rise of commercial society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the political influence of money, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of economic dominance from England to America. Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century cannot disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of money. Michie's fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.

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9781421409641

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Reviews

A seminal body of outstanding scholarship and a very highly recommended addition to academic library English Literature reference collections and supplemental reading lists. Midwest Book Review An indispensable survey of the figure of the rich woman in the novel of manners from Austen to James... Michie's writing is clear, precise, and lucid. An important work. Essential. Choice Bold, engaging, and richly complicated... It is immensely valuable in calling our attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century marriage plots and the discourses of political economy generally and to the maligned but ubiquitous figure of the heiress in particular, challenging critics today to overcome their own sense of money as a vulgar question. -- Nancy Henry Review of English Studies Michie's book opens up new angles from which to think about the relations between money and marrying in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Rachel Bowlby Times Literary Supplement One of the most valuable pieces of criticism this year. The emphasis and clarity of its writing is a delight in itself. -- Talia Schaffer Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies The mixture of laughter, guilt, and envy that characterizes our culture's response to the unattractive rich woman is fully explored and exorcized in this closely argued study. -- Valerie Sanders Nineteenth-Century Literature This is a valuable study that will be useful to anyone interested in gender and economics in the nineteenth century. -- Patricia Zakreski Modern Language Review The rich development of its themes, no less than its local insights, should place this book high on Victorianists' reading lists. -- Jill Rappoport Victorian Studies

A seminal body of outstanding scholarship and a very highly recommended addition to academic library English Literature reference collections and supplemental reading lists. Midwest Book Review 2011 An indispensable survey of the figure of the rich woman in the novel of manners from Austen to James... Michie's writing is clear, precise, and lucid. An important work. Essential. Choice 2012 Bold, engaging, and richly complicated... It is immensely valuable in calling our attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century marriage plots and the discourses of political economy generally and to the maligned but ubiquitous figure of the heiress in particular, challenging critics today to overcome their own sense of money as a vulgar question. -- Nancy Henry Review of English Studies 2012 Michie's book opens up new angles from which to think about the relations between money and marrying in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Rachel Bowlby Literary Criticism and Law 2012 One of the most valuable pieces of criticism this year. The emphasis and clarity of its writing is a delight in itself. -- Talia Schaffer Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 2012 The mixture of laughter, guilt, and envy that characterizes our culture's response to the unattractive rich woman is fully explored and exorcized in this closely argued study. -- Valerie Sanders Nineteenth-Century Literature 2012

A seminal body of outstanding scholarship and a very highly recommended addition to academic library English Literature reference collections and supplemental reading lists. Midwest Book Review An indispensable survey of the figure of the rich woman in the novel of manners from Austen to James... Michie's writing is clear, precise, and lucid. An important work. Essential. Choice Bold, engaging, and richly complicated... It is immensely valuable in calling our attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century marriage plots and the discourses of political economy generally and to the maligned but ubiquitous figure of the heiress in particular, challenging critics today to overcome their own sense of money as a vulgar question. -- Nancy Henry Review of English Studies Michie's book opens up new angles from which to think about the relations between money and marrying in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Rachel Bowlby Times Literary Supplement One of the most valuable pieces of criticism this year. The emphasis and clarity of its writing is a delight in itself. -- Talia Schaffer Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies The mixture of laughter, guilt, and envy that characterizes our culture's response to the unattractive rich woman is fully explored and exorcized in this closely argued study. -- Valerie Sanders Nineteenth-Century Literature This is a valuable study that will be useful to anyone interested in gender and economics in the nineteenth century. -- Patricia Zakreski Modern Language Review The rich development of its themes, no less than its local insights, should place this book high on Victorianists' reading lists. -- Jill Rappoport Victorian Studies This is a sophisticated and thought-provoking study. The Year's Work in English Studies

A seminal body of outstanding scholarship and a very highly recommended addition to academic library English Literature reference collections and supplemental reading lists. Midwest Book Review 2011 An indispensable survey of the figure of the rich woman in the novel of manners from Austen to James... Michie's writing is clear, precise, and lucid. An important work. Essential. Choice 2012 Bold, engaging, and richly complicated... It is immensely valuable in calling our attention to the relationship between nineteenth-century marriage plots and the discourses of political economy generally and to the maligned but ubiquitous figure of the heiress in particular, challenging critics today to overcome their own sense of money as a vulgar question. -- Nancy Henry Review of English Studies 2012 Michie's book opens up new angles from which to think about the relations between money and marrying in nineteenth-century fiction. -- Rachel Bowlby Times Literary Supplement 2012 One of the most valuable pieces of criticism this year. The emphasis and clarity of its writing is a delight in itself. -- Talia Schaffer Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 2012 The mixture of laughter, guilt, and envy that characterizes our culture's response to the unattractive rich woman is fully explored and exorcized in this closely argued study. -- Valerie Sanders Nineteenth-Century Literature 2012 This is a valuable study that will be useful to anyone interested in gender and economics in the nineteenth century. -- Patricia Zakreski Modern Language Review 2013

Author Information

Elsie B. Michie is a professor of English at Louisiana State University, coeditor of Victorian Vulgarity, editor of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre : A Casebook and The Lottery of Marriage by Frances Trollope , and author of Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer.

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