L. T. Meade (1844-1914) was one of the most popular and industrious writers of the Victorian fin de siècle. She is remembered as the creator of the modern girls’ school story, but over the course of a professional career that spanned four decades, Meade wrote close to three hundred books and countless short stories in a variety of genres for readers of all ages. She also edited the highly regarded middle-class girls’ literary magazine Atalanta from 1887 to 1893. She was considered a literary celebrity by the influential Strand Magazine where her innovative medical mysteries and sensational stories of female criminals competed with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. But Meade was more than a successful author. She was also an influential participant in London’s literary circles and an active member of numerous literary professional, and feminist associations. Despite the scope of Meade’s career and her significant presence in the literary marketplace, her name has now passed into relative obscurity. Assessments of Meade in the twentieth century have been limited, dismissive, and generally negative. But as I demonstrate in this dissertation, many of these assessments are based on a narrow reading of her girls’ fiction and an incomplete sense of her professional activity. This dissertation, based on a historically contextualized reading of a broad selection of Meade’s works, focuses on the author as a professional woman writer and editor and highlights some of her significant contributions to popular literature and popular culture generally. The chapters in this study are organized into sections that reflect the trajectory of Meade’s career. Part I, “Meade and the Market,” introduces Meade as a professional writer. It includes biographical information, a discussion of Meade’s self representation, and an examination of a selection of her texts to show how she identified literary trends and used topical issues to frame her stories and market them to publishers and the reading public. Part II, “Meade and Atalanta,” focuses on Meade as a professional woman editor. It consists of three linked chapters on Meade and the girls’ literary magazine Atalanta and includes an examination of Meade’s contributions to juvenile periodical literature as well as a discussion of Atalanta as a family literary magazine. Part III, “New Markets and New Genres,” focuses on Meade as a popular professional woman writer and examines her involvement with the popular press in the years following her departure from Atalanta. It shows how Meade’s involvement with the Strand Magazine signalled a new direction in her literary style and market orientation and highlights her significant contributions to detective and mystery fiction. Throughout this study, I argue that Meade was more than a popular girls’ author; she was also a successful professional woman writer and editor, a shrewd businesswoman, and a significant participant in the literary marketplace. I also argue that Meade’s career merits consideration because it offers important insights into the way fin-de-siècle women writers shaped their careers and positioned themselves in the literary marketplace. / Graduate / 10000-01-01

<p>At first glance Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is merely a story about a horse’s life, adventures and destiny. However, a parallel feminist reading reveals and foregrounds the living conditions for women in Victorian England but since this was a highly controversial issue, she was forced to disguise her true intentions. I support my thesis that Sewell is really dealing with the female body as abused, violently disciplined and prostituted by drawing on a wide range of secondary material such as legal acts and women’s fashion.</p>

At first glance Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is merely a story about a horse’s life, adventures and destiny. However, a parallel feminist reading reveals and foregrounds the living conditions for women in Victorian England but since this was a highly controversial issue, she was forced to disguise her true intentions. I support my thesis that Sewell is really dealing with the female body as abused, violently disciplined and prostituted by drawing on a wide range of secondary material such as legal acts and women’s fashion.

The politics of Jane Austen’s novels have long been a topic of scholarly interest. Many scholars see Austen’s heroines as women embedded in the typical, conservative marriage plot while others see them as proto-feminist figures of intelligence and power. Her heroines have now become famous for their moral and intellectual lives, but many scholars argue that all of Austen’s heroines must be brought down through the correction of a superior male character in order to atone for their freedom of manner early in the novel and secure a suitable mate. In “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies this as “the Girl Being Taught a Lesson” tradition of Austen scholarship. In this thesis, I argue that the scene of the girl being taught a lesson is actually a cover for the more progressive correction that the heroine gives to her family, friends and, most importantly, her male counterpart. We see that these intelligent women do not need to be taught a lesson in order to correct flaws in their characters. On the contrary, these women correct themselves through careful self-analysis and self-correction and use their intelligence and knowledge to teach other characters. In my three chapters, I argue that Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Emma Woodhouse in Emma, and Anne Elliot in Persuasion act as moral centers in these Austen novels. We see particular emphasis on these women’s corrections of the male characters in Elizabeth’s continual correction of Mr. Darcy, particularly in her rebuff of his proposal, in Emma’s correcting Mr. Knightley’s opinions of Harriet Smith and in teaching him to respect her impressive intellect, and in Anne’s teaching Captain Wentworth to respect her decision to give him up and to acknowledge, once again, her superior sense, intellect and moral character. These women are not contained by marriage; instead, they teach their male counterparts before marriage and show that they will continue these lessons after their respective unions. I show that these three heroines teach and correct those around them, offering a new perspective on female intellectual work and its importance within marriage and in improving society, one character at a time. / Thesis / Master

This essay argues that Elizabeth Gaskell challenges the limiting gender roles of the Victorian era through giving her heroine, Margaret Hale in North and South, both the traditionally female qualities of virtue and selflessness and the traditionally masculine qualities of independence and action. The essay also argues that Gaskell’s heroine balances between the feminine and the masculine world as to not appear “unwomanly”, but rather subtly influencing the readers and calls for changing gender norms. Concrete examples of the heroine’s gender transgressions are put forward, but also her compliance to the traditional gender roles summed up in three roles or themes: the angel in the house, the female visitor and the refined lady. This essay also provides a didactic approach on working with North and South and the topic of Victorian gender norms in the upper secondary school. The relevance of and reasons for reading literature in school are also presented. The didactic chapter offers a concrete lesson plan on how to work with the theme of Victorian gender norms, which may develop students’ emphatic skills and also make them aware of ties between themselves and people that lived a long time ago.

The Sirens episode in The Odyssey is comparably short, but it is one of the most memorable scenes in the epic. Sirens are trying to stop the male narrative, the male quest of Odysseus with their own female "narrative power" (Doherty 82). They are the quintessential marginalized, calling for a voice, a presence, an audience in the text of patriarchy. The knowledge they promise, though, comes with the price of death. They are covertly sexual in Classical antiquity, but since the rise of Christianity, a new Siren emerged from the depths of the sea; instead of the sexually ambiguous embodiment of knowledge, she became fleshy, bestial, and lustful (Lao 113). In his Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy creates a Victorian Siren in the form of Arabella Donn, who personifies all of the misogynistic qualities of womanhood. She is deceptive, bestial, lecherous, and aligned with death and destruction. Intentionally or not, however, Hardy's Arabella is also paradoxically a bearer of truth and wisdom. This thesis will further textual study of Jude the Obscure and provide a new reading of Arabella Donn.

This thesis examines the popular Victorian novelist Ouida (Maria Louisa Ramé) in the context of women’s authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first of its two intentions is to recuperate some of the historical and literary significance of this critically neglected writer by considering on her own terms her desire to be recognised as a serious artist. More broadly, it begins to fill in the gap that exists in scholarship on women’s authorship as it pertains to those writers who come between George Eliot, the last of the ‘great’ mid-Victorian women novelists, and the New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle. Four of Ouida’s novels have been chosen for critical analysis, each of which was written at an important moment in the history of the nineteenth century novel. Her early novel Strathmore (1865) is shaped by the rebelliousness towards gendered models of authorship characteristic of women writers who began their careers in the 1860s. In this novel, Ouida undermines the binary oppositions of gender that were in large part constructed and maintained by the domestic novel and which controlled the representation and reception of women’s authorship in the mid-nineteenth century. Tricotrin (1869) was written at the end of the sensation fiction craze, a phenomenon that resulted in the incipient splitting of the high art novel from the popular novel. In Tricotrin, Ouida responds to the gendered ideology of occupational professionalism that was being deployed to distinguish between masculinised serious and feminised popular fiction, an ideology that rendered her particularly vulnerable as a popular writer. Ouida’s autobiographical novel Friendship (1878) is also written at an critical period in the novel’s ascent to high art. Registering the way in which the morally weighted realism favoured by novelists and critics at the mid-century was being overtaken by a desire for more formally oriented, serious fiction, Ouida takes the opportunity both to defend her novels against the realist critique of her fiction and to attempt to shape the new literary aesthetic in a way that positively incorporated femininity and the feminine. Finally, Princess Napraxine (1884) is arguably the first British novel seriously to incorporate the imagery and theories of aestheticism. In this novel, Ouida resists male aesthetes’ exploitative attempts to obscure their relationship to the developing consumer culture while confidently finding a place for the woman artist within British aestheticism and signalling a new acceptance of her own involvement in the marketplace. Together, these novels track Ouida’s self-conscious response to a changing literary marketplace that consistently marginalised women writers at the same time that they enable us to begin to uncover the complexity of female authorship in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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This thesis explores the ways in which Lady Jane Wilde, writing under the pen name of Speranza, established ethos among a poor, uneducated, Catholic populace from whom she was socially and religiously disconnected. Additionally, it raises questions as to Lady Wilde's exclusion from the roster of Irish literary voices who are commonly associated with the Irish Literary Revival, inasmuch as Lady Wilde played a critical, inceptive role in that movement. Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar Wilde, was an ardent nationalist who lived in Victorian Ireland. She contributed thirty-nine poems and several essays to the Nation newspaper—a nationalist publication—under the nom de plume of Speranza, which is Italian for "hope." However, her audience consisted largely of the Irish peasantry, who were for the most part poor, uneducated, and Catholic. The peasantry had little tolerance generally for members of the Protestant ascendancy who had held them in subjugation under the Penal Laws for so long. Lady Wilde, however, was wealthy, educated, and Protestant. Nevertheless, she claimed that she represented the "voice" of the Irish people. This thesis explores the notion that Lady Wilde gained popularity and trustworthiness among Irish commoners by fashioning herself after the Celtic Sovereignty goddesses in her dress, her motto and pen name, and her poetry. Also, by connecting herself with Irish folklore, Lady Wilde played an unsung role in the development of the Irish Literary Revival—a late nineteenth and early twentieth century movement that sought cultural sovereignty for Ireland in the face of English political rule. Despite her central role in the nationalist movement and her inceptive place in the Irish Literary Revival, though, Lady Wilde has been largely excluded from twentieth century historical texts and anthologies. Possible reasons for this exclusion are raised in this thesis, as well as a call for current and future critics to restore Lady Wilde to her rightful place as an important voice in Irish national and literary history. The first appendix of this thesis include selections from among Lady Wilde's poetry as they first appeared in the Nation newspaper and were later published in a compilation titled Poems, by Speranza. The second appendix contains the full text of a discourse analysis conducted on Lady Wilde's poetry in an effort to further strengthen the argument that she mimicked the role of the Celtic Sovereignty in her poetry.

Female characters in novels by Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster are studied in their relationships as wives, mothers, daughters and prospective brides. The novels selected are those where the writers are concerned with families dominated by Victorian ideals. Virginia Woolf: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Bay (1919), Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927). E.M. Forster: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907) , A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910).The socioeconomic, religious and ideological origins of the Victorian ideals are traced, esp. as they are related to the writers' family background in the tradition of English intellectual life. The central theme of the four novels by Woolf is the mother-daughter relationship which is analyzed in its components of love and resentment, often revealed in an interior monoloque. Forster's novels usually present a widowed mother with a daughter and a son. It is shown how the plot, dialogue and authorial intrusions are used to depict a liberation from the constraints of the Victorian ideals of family life. The mothers in the novels of both writers are shown to be representative of various aspects of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. The attitudes of men towards women vary from those typifying Victorian conceptions of male superiority to more modern ideals of equality and natural companionship. / digitalisering@umu