Marriage, property, and women's narratives / Sally A. Livingston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Livingston, Sally A.

Series:

New Middle Ages

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Economic conditions.

Women.

Married women--Economic conditions.

Married women.

Right of property--History.

Right of property.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 226 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, [2012]

Summary:

Marriage, Property, and Women's Narratives addresses Virginia Woolf's question, "Why are women poor?" Drawing from three different time periods and three distinct legal models of female property ownership, this study investigates how women writers frame their responses to both owning property and being property within the context of marriage. Beginning with the MiddleAges, Sally A. Livingston traces the loss of women's economic rights and skillfully argues that literary narratives allow these writers to take possession of property they would not otherwise be able to own. Book jacket.

Contents:

Property's history, property's literature

Silence, language, sexuality

Medieval women reject marriage: Heloise and Marie de France

Sexual purity as property: Vie Seinte Audree and The Book of Margery Kempe

Property and propriety in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England: Burney, Austen, Eliot

Virginia Woolf's women, trapped and freed

Mid-nineteenth-century Russia: women writers reject the marriage plot

Conclusion: why are women poor?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [195]-214) and index.

ISBN:

9780230115064

0230115063

OCLC:

744287302