Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays

First published in 1995. The essays in this volume demonstrate how Victorian women took up various positions along a continuum that ranged from the desire of Shelley’s creature for the power and acceptance it associated with the house to the rejection of Brontë’s heroine of the immobility and powerlessness she ultimately experienced there. More specifically the essays in this volume explore the nature of the Victorian woman’s domestic relations by centring in one activity that most informed her place in what was often the father’s house: housekeeping. The essays in this edition determine how writers, especially novelists, both male and female, used housekeeping to construct, reconstruct, represent, and inscribe the female self and condition. This title will be of interest to students of history and literature.