Victorian Social Activists’ Novels
Editor: Oliver Lovesey
978 1 85196 629 5: 234x156mm: £350.00/$625.00
This four-volume reset edition draws together five novels by well-known Victorian campaigners: law reform campaigner Caroline Norton (1808–77), suffrage activist Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), social purity writer and organizer Ellice Jane Hopkins (1836–1904), social work innovator Mary Eleanor Benson (1863–90), and medical rights advocate Margaret Todd (1859–1918). The edition addresses the role of fiction in Victorian social activism, the authors’ ambivalent relationship with the women’s movement and their willingness to negotiate with the Victorian political, legal, and religious establishment. The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their novels employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance, female bildungsroman, and lesbian fiction. The novels are republished here for the first time and are supported by selections from the authors' campaign literature, fiction, and other writings.
The position of fiction in the careers of these women pursuing pragmatic social change at great personal cost is complex. Fiction writing was widely recognized as a ‘profession’ open to women, supplying ready money for personal expenses and for the social cause. It also permitted access to a broad readership that could not be reached through pamphlets or periodicals, and it allowed the potential for enormous and enormously influential literary celebrity. Moreover, romance and the novel had an important position in female education, and fiction permitted a type of imaginative, emotional address allowing writers to voice some of their most unorthodox opinions. The novels selected for this edition all engage with questions of female vocation and marriage rights, and have extensive treatments of physical or psychological disability.
This edition responds to recent scholarly rehabilitations of little-known female writers and widens the canon further. It will be essential for those studying Nineteenth-Century Studies, Literature, Women’s Writing and Women’s History.
Contents
Volume 1
Caroline Norton, The Wife (1835)
Appendix: Selections from The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829); Woman’s Reward (1835); A Voice from the Factories (1836); Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of her Infant Children: as Affected by the Common Law Rights of the Father (1837); English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854); A Letter to the Queen on Lord Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855); Lost and Saved (1863)
Caroline Norton (1808–77) is one of the best-known Victorian women’s rights activists whose actions led to the passage of laws aimed at equalizing the rights of men and women in marriage. After Norton left an unhappy marriage, her husband denied her parental access and attempted to render his wife penniless. Norton launched a pamphlet and lobbying campaign to change the law. The result was the passage of the Infant Custody Act (1839), which secured mothers custody of their young children. In the 1840s and 50s, her husband’s attempt under the law to reduce his payments to her and to take over her inheritance erupted in another scandalous court case that led her to tackle the law’s denial of women’s property rights. Her pamphlet campaign was influential in the securing passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857).
The Wife is a semi-autobiographical dissection of marriage à-la-mode that focuses on two repressed love affairs and two deeply unhappy marriages. It is a satire of marriage conventions and the conventions of romance, which hinges on an unusual treatment of disability.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Janet Doncaster (1875)
Appendix: selections from ‘The Education of Women’, ‘Why Women Require the Franchise’, Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects (1872); Political Economy for Beginners (1880); ‘Introduction,’ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1891); Paper on the Amendments Required in the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (1892); Home and Politics (1894); Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1895); What I Remember (1924); Josephine Butler: Her Work and Principles, and Their Meaning for the Twentieth Century (1928)
Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) was one of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. She and her sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and their friend Emily Davies divided their work on women’s rights; Davies tackled education, Elizabeth medicine, and Millicent the franchise. Her fundamental position was that with true universal suffrage, all other injustices for women would be corrected, and she combined this focus sometimes uneasily with a commitment to trade unions, free markets, patriotism, and empire.
Janet Doncaster, her first of two novels (a second novel was published under a pseudonym), focuses on the independent career of a woman within a disastrous marriage. Unlike Millicent Garrett Fawcett who became her husband’s secretary and primary care-giver for many years, Janet assesses her domestic situation, judges it unworkable, and departs. Janet Doncaster is a realistic parable focused on an individual with little emotional support and a poor education who must learn to discount heroic fantasies. The penniless, friendless girl displays true nobility and gains a solid inheritance of independent self-assertion.
Volume 2
Ellice Jane Hopkins, Rose Turquand (1876)
Appendix: selections from Home Thoughts for Mothers and Mothers’ Meetings (1869); The Visitation of Dens, An Appeal to the Women of England (1874); Work Among the Lost (1874); Work in Brighton; or, Woman’s Mission to Women (1877); A Plea for the Wider Action of the Church of England in the Prevention of the Degradation of Women, As Submitted to a Committee of Convocation on July 3, 1879 (1879); The White Cross Army, A Statement of the Bishop of Durham’s Movement (1883); The Black Anchor (1883); The Power of Womanhood; Or, Mothers and Sons. A Book for Parents and those in Loco Parentis (1899)
Ellice Jane Hopkins (1836–1904) is best-known today as a late Victorian social activist and writer of frequently-reprinted pamphlets. She was a social purity campaigner who campaigned against the sexual double standard and fought to end the trade of prostitution that for her rivaled the sanction of African slavery as a national disgrace.
Rose Turquand is a Gothic romance which, like Hopkins’ pamphlets, combines an unorthodox Church of England spirituality, bordering on the mystical, with a bluntly pragmatic Low Church evangelicalism and a disarming frankness in discussing sexual matters. It was written at a transitional moment in her career as an activist. After its publication, Hopkins moved from rescue work with women in Cambridge brothels and organizational work setting up safe houses in Brighton and Portsmouth into preventative work with men though the establishment and promotion of the national and international campaign for male purity, the White Cross Army. Hopkins uses a popular form of journalistic Gothic fiction to advance her moral agenda. She blends various narrative strands: the monsters, monks, and dark secrets of Gothic romance; the criminal story of bigamy and attempted murder in a self-consciously modern setting characteristic of sensation fiction.
Volume 3
Mary Eleanor Benson, At Sundry Times and in Divers Manners (1891)
Appendix: selections from A C Benson’s ‘Brief Memoir,’ prefaced to At Sundry Times (1891); ‘In Defense of Domestic Service,’ Nineteenth Century (1890); ‘The Amusements of the Very Respectable,’ ‘Girls’ Friendships,’ ‘The Familiarity of Death,’ ‘Old Age,’ ‘The Small Servants—A Success and a Failure’, Streets and Lanes of the City (1891)
Mary Eleanor Benson (1863–90) was the daughter of E W Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a social work activist whose writing and direct action during her short life contributed indirectly to the professionalization of social work in London. She read Modern Languages at Oxford and published essays on literature and history in addition to her work among the poor. She belonged to a fascinating and what would become an extensively documented household that seems to have been an unusual instance of a large Victorian family in which the matriarch as well as virtually all the siblings were devoted to passionate same-sex relationships.
At Sundry Times and in Divers Manners is set in a small parish. Its focus is the spiritual and personal relations of three sets of characters as well as the religious development of one particular woman, Ruth Kinnaird. Jealousy links the three groups of characters in a series of passionate hetero- and homosexual relationships.
Volume 4
Margaret Todd, Mona Maclean: Medical Student (1892)
Appendix: selections from Sophia Jex-Blake, ‘Medical Women in Fiction,’ Nineteenth Century (1893); ‘Some Thoughts on the Woman Question,’ Blackwood’s (1894); Margaret Todd, The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake (1918)
Margaret Georgina Todd (1859-1918) was born into a stridently religious and wealthy Glaswegian family. She became a medical doctor in 1894 and practised at the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, and she lived with Sophia Jex-Blake as her companion and virtual disciple for 25 years. She committed suicide in 1918, six years after Jex-Blake’s death and a few months after seeing her biography of Jex-Blake in print. More than any of the other social activists in this collection, Todd appears to have regarded herself as a novelist as much as an advocate for women’s medical training or a doctor, and she published six novels.
In her first and most popular novel, Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), she wrote with an assured sense of her own insider knowledge of the medical field. The tone of the novel is buoyantly optimistic and it ends with a successful marriage of professional and personal fulfillment, which may have deflected scrutiny from its more radical elements and helped to assure the novel’s success. Mona Maclean was ostensibly a reply to Charles Reade’s A Woman-Hater (1877), one of the first novels to feature a female doctor and a doctor clearly modeled on Jex-Blake. While appearing to promote the cause of medical women, Reade’s novel domesticates and diminishes their professional ambitions. Mona Maclean celebrates a Victorian woman’s professional fulfillment, and it is an example of New Woman fiction in its radical redefinition of the stereotype of the intelligent woman as hysterical, and may even be read as an example of lesbian fiction. Moreover, as Kristine Swenson suggests, the novel may be both autobiographical as well as a fictionalized biography of Jex-Blake.