Reconciling Female Conflict: The Portrayal of Women Readers in Victorian England from 1850--1890

Two images of women readers materialize during the nineteenth-century: the young woman who reads novels secretly and forms unrealistic expectations of love and life and the young independent woman reading to educate herself. Both images turn reading into a subversive act which parents and educators wish to avoid. From Jane Austen to George Gissing, major nineteenth-century authors deal with and form an ongoing discussion of these images. In this project, I explore the representation of reading and these social critiques in the following texts: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife (1864), Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). Juxtaposed with actual accounts of woman's reading in diaries, autobiographies, and letters, from these texts emerge two concerns regarding woman's role in the home and in Victorian society---their role in relation to men and their sexuality. The figure of the woman reader potentially upsets both of these relationships.;Together, the different types of texts I examine set the experience of real readers in dialogue with fictional narrative. Each of the works selected for this project presents how women's engagement with books evolves throughout the century allowing them to find a space through the construction of subjectivity and intellectual development that helps them overcome the confines of traditional gender roles, redefine themselves, and emerge from the Victorian era autonomous beings. I argue that as these changes are occurring, the image of the woman reader becomes for both men and women writers not only a way to express women's agency, promoting their autonomy, but also a way of demonstrating female transgression from accepted societal norms while attempting to reconcile the conflict between female potential and traditional Victorian gender roles.