Educating Women: Cultural Conflict and Victorian Literature
"In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines - students, teachers, and frustrated scholars - at the center of their books."...
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Green (English, Northeastern U.) seeks to undermine the opposition between the apparent progressivism of a historical narrative of educating women, and the apparent conservatism of a fictional structure of marrying them off. Analyzing both fiction and nonfiction texts of late-19th-century Britain, she looks at the relationship between the movement to establish higher education for women and the profusion of representations of women as students, teachers, or frustrated scholars in domestic novels. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1Domesticity and Duplicity: The Rhetoric of the Higher Education Movement12Living on the Moon: Jane Eyre and the Limits of Self-Education243From English Governess to Orientalist Scholar: Female Pedagogy and Power in Anna Leonowens's The English Governess at the Siamese Court464"At once narrow and promiscuous": Emily Davies, George Eliot, and Middlemarch705"Strange [in]difference of sex": Thomas Hardy and the Temptations of Androgyny101Notes129Works Cited141Index149
