Maude by Christina Rossetti, "On Sisterhoods" and A Woman's Thoughts About Women By Dinah Mulock Craik

Maude was written when Christina Rossetti was nineteen. Clearly autobiographical, the novel examines the heroine's struggle to resist the notion that modesty, virtue and domesticity constitute the duties of women. Rossetti, often overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, struggled to express her own independent authorial voice. "On Sisterhoods" confronts head-on 'the woman question', asserting that the woman's role is to find beauty in her life through altruism and good works. Craik provides a radical solution to 'the woman question' by advocating the encouragement of Anglican Sisterhood; effectively the woman's co-operatives.

Writing from very different perspectives and backgrounds, Christina Rossetti and Dinah Mulock Craik were profoundly concerned with the problems of single women and female vocation. Maude, written when Rossetti was nineteen years old, reveals, with great clarity, her desires and anxieties about literary achievement within the confines of Victorian values and family restrictions. Although never seriously drawn to convent life, Rossetti became for a time an associate of one of the flourishing and controversial Anglican Sisterhoods.

Craik's essay 'On Sisterhoods', in which she encourages unmarried women to join these organisations, shows that in offering work, responsibility and security outside the family, the Sisterhoods presented a challenge to contemporary ideas about the place and duty of women. The immensely popular, progressive and optimistic A Woman's Thoughts About Women emerges as an essentially rational work, urging women to act individually, collectively and above all positively, in forging their own destinies.

Contents

Introduction; Chronology - Rosetti; Chronology - Craik; Selected bibliography - Rossetti; Selected bibliography - Craik; Christina Rosetti, Maude (1897); Dinah Mulock Craik, 'On Sisterhoods'; A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

Return to top