Relational Reading

Abstract

Two recently published books ask the same question: How might we read textual representations of Victorian women by focusing on their relationality, not their separate individuality? Ronjaunee Chatterjee's Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Carolyn Dever's Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field both stress that multiple genres of Victorian writing depend upon the intimate play of tension and identification among women who are not-quite-one. They enact that idea, however, in rather different ways.