The Woman Reader 1837–1914

Abstract

This book provides an invaluable source of information on nineteenth-century culture and the woman reader. Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read? The book examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and poetry, through medical and psychoanalytic works, advice manuals and periodicals, to autobiographies and contemporary social research, in her detailed study of this central cultural debate in nineteenth-century society. Engaging also in recent feminist theory, the book explores the manipulation of the figure of the woman reader in well-known works like Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, in sensation novels and New Woman fiction, and in stories found in series such as The Princess’s Novelettes. This is supported by evidence from actual readers — working women, as well as the privileged — as to how they understood their own highly varied reading experiences.