Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel [Hardcover]

Tom Winnifrith examines how the great nineteenth-century novelists managed to say something new and important about sexual behaviour in spite of rules which dictated that the recording of this behaviour should combine the utmost discretion and deep disapproval. On the surface their fallen heroines seem to suffer the conventional cruel fate of the erring female: death or Australia or both. Tom Winnifrith examines ways in which the great novelists continued to portray the complexities underlying the simple division of women into angels and whores.Preface - Introduction - Austen - Bronte - Eliot - Thackeray - Dickens - Hardy - Conclusion - Bibliography - IndexTOM WINNIFRITH is Senior Lecturer in the Joint School of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has previously been an assistant master at Eton College, E K Chambers student at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, William Noble Fellow at the University of Liverpool, and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His many previous books include The Bront?s and their Background, Bront? Facts and Bront? Problems (with Edward Chitham), Aspects of the Epic, Greece Old and New, Nineteen Eighty Four and All's Well? (with William Whitehead) and A New Life of Charlotte Bront?.