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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Liggins, Emma, Author.

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.

Women in literature.

Single women in literature.

Widows in literature.

Lesbians in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Women outside marriage between 1850 and the Second World War were seen as abnormal, threatening, superfluous and incomplete, whilst also being hailed as 'women of the future'. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book considers how Victorian and modernist women's writing challenged the heterosexual plot and reconfigured conceptualisations of public and private space in order to valorise female oddity.

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:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on November 18, 2014).

ISBN:

1-78170-685-9