Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question

Women writers dominated the vast novel market in Victorian England, yet twentieth-century criticism has, until now, been chiefly concerned with a small number of canonical novelists. This collection of essays by leading scholars from Britain, the USA and Canada opens up the limited landscape of Victorian novels by focusing attention on some of the women writers popular in their own time but forgotten or neglected by literary history. Spanning the entire Victorian period, this study investigates particularly the role and treatment of ‘the woman question’ in the second half of the century. There are discussions of marriage, matriarchy and divorce, satire, suffragette writing, writing for children, and links between literature and art. Moving from Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Mary Yonge to Mary Ward, Marie Corelli, ‘Ouida’ and E. Nesbit, this book illuminates the complex cultural and literary roles, and the engaging contributions, of Victorian women writers.