Odd Women? : spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s-1930s / Emma Liggins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Liggins, Emma.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

English fiction--Women authors.

Women in literature.

Single women in literature.

Widows in literature.

Lesbians in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 275 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2014.

Summary:

This genealogy of the odd woman compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women fiction and auto biography from the 1850s to the 1930s. Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as women of the future. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters in British women fiction, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book examines how women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair, E. H. young, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, challenged dominant perceptions of singleness and lesbianism in their novels, stories and autobiographies.

Contents:

Female redundancy, widowhood and the mid-Victorian heroine

Bachelor girls, mistresses and the New Woman heroine

Spinster heroines, aunts and widowed mothers, 1910-39

The misfit lesbian heroine of inter-war fiction

Professional spinsters, older women and widowed heroines in the 1930s.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780719087561

0719087562

OCLC:

875151510