19th-century and Victorian Literature

Curious Subjects focuses on the relationship between women, curiosity, and the rise of the novel, using the lenses of scientific, legal, and “fictional” curiosity to examine the changing definitions of the subject within these various discourses. Texts range from eighteenth-century fiction to classic Victorian “heroine texts,” to contemporary revisions of realist forms, with an emphasis on the always-doubled and duplicitous nature of both female curiosity and the realist project. The book rethinks the question of female knowledge from within the form of the novel, using not just the metaphor but the history of curiosity after the Enlightenment. It begins with the wanderings of curiosity from medieval pilgrims’ relics to private collections to public museums, and interweaves this history with the origins of the modern legal subject, arguing that the most intriguing version of that subject is the curious heroine. So, from the beginning of the book, the rise of the novel, the evolution of curiosity, and the enfranchisement of women are deeply intertwined. Central literary figures include Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Henry James, with examples ranging from Paradise Lost and Clarissa to The Sadeian Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale, from Freud to Bluebeard’s wife.

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women’s personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women’s giving from the 1820s to World War I. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialization in the periodical press was not just complexly reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer outwards into other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the new woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.