The Woman Reader 1837–1914

Abstract

This book provides an invaluable source of information on nineteenth-century culture and the woman reader. Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read? The book examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and poetry, through medical and psychoanalytic works, advice manuals and periodicals, to autobiographies and contemporary social research, in her detailed study of this central cultural debate in nineteenth-century society. Engaging also in recent feminist theory, the book explores the manipulation of the figure of the woman reader in well-known works like Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, in sensation novels and New Woman fiction, and in stories found in series such as The Princess’s Novelettes. This is supported by evidence from actual readers — working women, as well as the privileged — as to how they understood their own highly varied reading experiences.

Gender and highbrow cultural participation in the United States

“…High culture is widely seen as a feminine realm. Historians trace the elective affinities between women's fiction reading and the rise of the separate spheres ideology among middle-and upper-class families to the 18 th and 19 th centuries (Gray 2000, Flint 1993, Douglas 1980. The separate spheres ideology emphasizes the gendered distinction between public and private: in the economic and political realms men have a central role as citizens and workers, while the family is a "haven in a heartless world" where women take center stage and seem to have unlimited power over children's education and the household 1 .…”

“GERM THEORIES”: BACTERIOLOGY IN ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON'S THE STORY OF A MODERN WOMAN

“…32 The Story of a Modern Woman functions as a Bildungsroman by vituperating against romance, making learning synonymous with discovering that reality is nothing like a romantic novel, and more generally opposing its realist aesthetics to the fantasies of romance. Dixon writes of Mary's ''[s]trange, anxious days, passed in the twilight of ignorance, groping among the vain shadows with which man in his wisdom has elected to surround the future mothers of the race''.…”

“The busy daughters of clio”: women writers of history from 1820 to 1880 [1]

“…By the 1870s and 1880s, many public libraries were open to women readers, and some began to provide women's reading rooms, and even to employ female library assistants. [55] In the Public Record Office, the petition of 1851 resulted in the waiving of fees for genuine applicants who submitted a written statement of purpose. After Mary Anne Everett Green's appointment in 1855 as an editor of state papers, it must have increasingly been difficult to refuse the requests of her fellow women historians.…”