June 22, 2007

Beyond Wives and Lovers

By JENNIFER HOWARD

In a new book, the literary scholar Sharon Marcus maps out the complex geography of Victorian womanhood

For Victorian novelists — and Victorian society in general — women existed in relation to men, who defined their desires and their place in the world. That has been the prevailing critical line for two or three decades now, as scholars have plowed through the 19th-century canon, digging up evidence of heterosexual hegemony and resistance to it.

But do we

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