Defiance and desire : nineteenth-century female writers and their characters

Abstract

This dissertation examines the strategies that women writers in nineteenth-century Britain adopted to assert their competence to write for financial gain, whilst also safeguarding their good name and social standing. They did this against a cultural status quo that sought to silence women’s voices from public discourse, consigning them to the solitude of the private, domestic sphere. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson, Susan Sniader Lanser, and Alexis Easley amongst others, the dissertation reviews how women writers negotiated their position as members, subject, or servant in society, asserted their authorial voice and authority and engaged in the emerging celebrity culture to protect or enhance their profile and reputation as women and as writers. A case study focus of Middlemarch and Miss Marjoribanks shows the challenges the heroines face to live their fullest lives whilst avoiding, or at least minimising, social condemnation. I argue that Eliot and Oliphant use their authorial voice and authority to highlight the injustice of a society determined to confine women to the domestic sphere. Finally, I demonstrate that women writers positioned themselves as literary celebrities to hack, disrupt, and disturb the cultural mainframe from below as they understood that in the Victorian era, play, as defined here by Matthew Kaiser, afforded them the power to conceive of new realities and opportunities, fulfilling both their roles in the home and their professional careers as writers.