Victorian and Edwardian Women: The Halves of Modern English Social HistoryWomen in English Social History, 1800-1914: A Guide to Research in Three Volumes. Barbara Kanner

Abstract

making of this guide over seven long years has been a great adventure, writes Barbara Kanner at the end of the preface to the massive enterprise reviewed here. Anyone less energetic and industrious would have required twice as long to compile these three volumes, for a lifetime's worth of reading is compressed into their two thousand pages. The sheer extravagance of detail encompassed, the wealth of information imparted, and the variety of viewpoints represented raise this bibliography far above the level of mere reference tool, while the abundant diversity itself confirms Kanner's explicit warnings against glib stereotypes or facile generalizations about English women's lives in the Victorian and Edwardian decades. The third volume, devoted to more than six hundred autobiographical works by female authors, particularly conveys the vast variety of their experiences, which the twelve chapters of the first two volumes investigate, in less personal terms, under such broad categories as Marriage and the Family, Sickness and Health Care, Religion and Spiritualism, Education, Crime and Deviance, Expansion of Employment, and much else. We learn of Isabel Homewood, bicycling around the world at the age of sixty-six, early in the twentieth century (3:118, 416); of Helen Bright, the Victorian circus star and lion queen, killed in the ring by one of her enraged cats (1:312, 2/1790); of missionary Catherine Edward who, in the mid-nineteenth century, still thought it worthwhile trying to convert the Jews of Eastern Europe (3:91, 306). Preachers, philanthropists, spiritualist mediums, athletes, archaeologists, actresses, musicians, milliners, millhands, servants, schoolmistresses, explorers, novelists, poets, daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers-women in every conceivable pursuit, situation, and frame of mind stand here shoulder to shoulder. Some twenty thousand primary and secondary published sources, over half of which Kanner has annotated, contribute to this mosaic of English womanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the items are, of course,