Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home [Paperback]

Revisionary study of how domestic work gained social credibility through the language of professionalism.Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of ninetenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of ninetenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.Preface; 1. Persuading the navy home: Austen and professional domesticism; 2. Homesick: the domestic interiors of Villette; 3. Dickens I: Great Expectations and vocational domesticity; 4. Dickens II: Little Dorrit in a home anl£#