Professional domesticity in the Victorian novel : women, work, and home

Summary: "Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century, and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalized culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology."--Jacket.

Record details

ISBN: 9780511585265
ISBN: 0511585268
ISBN: 9780511008085
ISBN: 0511008082
Physical Description: 1 online resource (xi, 216 pages)
remote
Publisher: Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-213) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism -- Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette -- Dickens I: Great expectations and vocational domesticity -- Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home: institutionalization and form -- Professing renunciation: domesticity in Felix Holt -- A prejudice for milk: professionalism, nationalism and domesticism in Daniel Deronda.
Restrictions on Access Note:	NLC staff and students only.
Language Note:	English.
Source of Description Note:	Print version record.