'Something specific to contribute': George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the challenges of feminism

Although respectively castigated as anti-feminist and ignored as too feminine, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell played an influential role, if not a political one, in the women's movement of nineteenth-century England. Both authors contributed to the movement through fiction reflecting their own and their readers' struggles in a male-dominated society. Their personal involvement with women's education and marriage rights and duties, even if they remained only on the fringes of the public debate, gave rise to images of women that indirectly helped influence the consciousness of a society.;Chapter One reexamines the image of the ideal woman in nineteenth-century England, the issues of the feminist movement, and the influence of fiction on certain feminists. The second and third chapters consider George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell's essays and letters specifically in light of the "woman question." Even though both authors have had their own words used against them, those same statements, when read in a larger context, often reveal a deep understanding of and sympathy toward the women's movement. Focusing on the heroines of The Mill on the Floss, Romola, and Middlemarch, Chapter Four uses Wayne Booth's theory of the implied reader to argue that George Eliot's insufficiently educated women led readers to question the status of women and their opportunities. By applying Edwin Ardener's theory of the "muted culture" to four of Gaskell's works--"Lizzie Leigh," Ruth, "The Grey Woman," and Wives and Daughters --the fifth chapter centers on Gaskell's protrayal of domestic women who, with the support of other women, rather than submit to the dominant culture, grow beyond their externally imposed limitations.