ABSTRACT In The Cloven Foot (1879), Mary Elizabeth Braddon combines elements of sensation fiction with the intimate backstage view of the ballet theatre, transporting readers through both sensation and spectacle. Braddon’s backstage view of the performers, crew, and management, calls attention to the commercial aspects of the theatre and dance world, and she emphasizes how theatres strove to attract audiences by providing a constant stream of amazing new entertainments for the viewing public. In the mid-Victorian ballet stage, Braddon may have found a useful mirror for her chosen genre of sensation fiction as she draws parallels between the viewing and reading audiences. By depicting how audiences demanded a constant flow of titillating entertainment, Braddon grapples with the sensation readers’ appetite for ever more astonishing spectacle and gestures toward the challenge of keeping up with that demand. The treatment of the ballet dancer’s body in The Cloven Foot allows Braddon to explore her own authorial relationship to sensation and spectacle. Aligning the reader with the theatrical spectator, Braddon invites considerations of how those consuming the text – written or performed – play a role in the exploitative spectacle and raises questions about the relationships among reader/viewer; author/performer; entertainment, and art.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s controversial piece, Ruth, and how the novel provides a critique of masculine norms through the neoliberal paradigm of the domestic sphere upheld by Christian standards. We see this phenomenon through her male characters, Henry Bellingham, Richard Bradshaw, and Thurstan Benson. Ruth’s reception and criticism has been mixed since its publication, but in recent decades has been more prominent in Gaskell studies circles, particularly as it relates to gender issues. However, little work has been done on the connection among masculinity, neoliberalism, and domestic labor in the novel up to this point. Through this analysis, I argue that Gaskell unveils the intentional surveillance that women face as “invisible” laborers in a privatized domestic economy couched in Christian standards, which contributes to ongoing scholarship in Victorian masculinity studies.

ABSTRACT This essay reads narratives of gendered exchange in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) via intersecting vocabularies of entitlement and consent as articulated by Victorian social theorist John Stuart Mill and reframed by modern feminist philosopher Kate Manne. In Eliot’s novel, heroine Maggie Tulliver finds herself bound by conflicting patriarchal scripts that compel her deference to entitled men and punish her for seeking masculine privileges like free movement, formal education, and self-determination. Even more insidiously, Maggie is expected to consent to these harmful social bargains. Unlike typical fallen woman novels of the period, Mill uses conventions of the Bildungsroman to treat Maggie’s ultimate social fall as a near-inevitable outcome of growing up in a society that conditions her to accommodate the masculine entitlements of father, brother, suitor. Eliot highlights Maggie’s impossible dilemma, thus implicating Victorian society in her tragedy. This intervention gains clarity through Manne’s theoretical framing. The essay closes with a reflection on Manne’s concept of “himpathy” – the tendency to sympathize with male perpetrators and blame female victims – as exemplified in the fictional town of St. Ogg’s, which ruthlessly judges its heroine for controverting the patriarchal order.

ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, novels by Mathilde Fibiger (1830–1872), Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865), and Fredrika Runeberg (1807–1879) promoting women’s rights became a starting-point for the subsequent women’s movements in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, respectively. Lutheran arguments were ubiquitous on both sides of the conflict over women’s emancipation. Anti-Catholicism was an integral part of the Nordic nationalist movements, embraced by these authors. Still Fibiger’s Clara Raphael (1851) and Runeberg’s Sigrid Liljeholm (1862) explicitly discuss Catholic forms of female religious authority, whereas Bremer ventured into an extended and personal investigation of the Catholic faith in her travelogue Two Years in Switzerland and Italy (1860/1861). I examine the tension between Lutheran nationalism and Catholic forms of female vocation underlying the arguments for women’s emancipation in Fibiger’s and Runeberg’s novels. Bremer’s travelogue provides a context for the approach to Catholicism in general, and a code to detect traces of Catholic female religious authority in Bremer’s own emancipation novel Hertha (1856). Catholicism is rejected and yet appropriated to reimagine the Lutheran idea of women’s vocation. The conflation of nationalist and religious discourse generates a double calling to women’s emancipation, ultimately portrayed as a sacred mission.

ABSTRACT The life of Kristín Guðmundsdóttir was rather short and thorn-stricken. At the age of 11, she contracted leprosy. The illness quickly took its toll on her, and at the age of 16 she became disabled. In 1898, Kristín was among the first patients admitted to the newly established Leprosy Hospital in Iceland. A collection of poems and hymns composed by Kristín after being admitted there is preserved in a manuscript at the National and University Library of Iceland. Her collection can be viewed as a microcosm or a miniature of the Leprosy Hospital. At the beginning, we are led into this large building and gradually introduced to some of its inhabitants. In her poems, Kristín attempted to strengthen the resilience of those who battled physical ailments and enhance their faith and trust. Simultaneously, Kristín provides invaluable insight into her life, characterised by poverty and illnesses. Despite these challenges, nothing seems to have broken her spiritual strength, joy, and faith.

ABSTRACT The article studies the spiritualist activity of the Norwegian pedagogue, school headmistress, women’s right activist, and publicist Ragna Nielsen (1845–1924) from three overarching perspectives. The first one relates to the discourse on spiritualism and its relationship with the Nordic Modern Breakthrough. In her séances, Nielsen claimed to have communicated with a number of deceased Norwegian intellectuals of that time. Second, the article examines the cross-pollination between Nielsen’s spiritualism and her commitment to the women’s rights movement. Third, the article investigates Nielsen’s use of spiritualism as a vehicle for self-promotion. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s writings in Specters of Marx (1993), here applied to a spiritualistic discourse, the article argues that Nielsen’s spiritualism is a hauntological project that resurrected the Nordic Modern Breakthrough, a cultural, literary, and political movement with which she had a number of scores to settle. In addition, the article argues that Nielsen’s spiritualism creates a peculiar semi-public sphere, in which the private environment of the séance is given a public dimension. As an example of women’s writing, Nielsen’s spiritualistic corpus challenges the Habermasian notion of a public sphere.

ABSTRACT Sophie Elkan (1853–1921) was a pioneering Swedish author who transformed the historical novel by merging psychological nuance with vivid historical settings. Although works such as John Hall (1899) and The King (1904) reveal her skill in depicting complex characters, her contributions remain undervalued due to personal and societal factors of her time. As a Jewish Swede in an era of rising antisemitism and nationalism, Elkan negotiated dual identities that shaped both her life and writing. This article shows that her Jewish background deeply informed her literary vision. In novels like The Dream of the Orient (1901) and From the East and the West (1908), Elkan challenged stereotypes, explored cultural hybridity, and portrayed tensions between Eastern and Western traditions. Her stories examine varied experiences of Jewish identity: “Herr Schwarz” contrasts assimilation with spiritual rootedness, “Expose the Armenian!” critiques Western missionary attitudes, and “Utterly Alone” reflects on personal reconciliation with heritage. Elkan’s secular yet engaged relationship to Judaism mirrored broader challenges faced by Swedish Jews confronting prejudice and pressure to assimilate. By bridging Jewish tradition with Western intellectual frameworks, she broadened discussions of identity and modernity. Her legacy remains vital for understanding literature’s role in cultural and societal transformation in turn-of-the-century Sweden.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Finnish women’s rights movement perceived the relationship between fiction and religion from the late 1880s until the First World War. For this purpose, the women’s press provides a good vantage point. The analysis shows that it was mainstream to award an ideological and pedagogical function to literature – literature was not purely perceived as art. Literature and authors had a duty to contribute to societal development and transformation. Good literature had to serve women’s rights and society’s progress. They were seen as dependent on high moral standards. Fiction had to defend women’s interests – that is, absolute sexual morality – and women writers were expected to put themselves in the service of ideologically correct literature. Christianity, properly understood, was interpreted as a support to progress at all levels of society. Essential in assessing the morality of fiction was to pay attention to how things were described. “Dirty” things could be represented as long as it was done in the right spirit. Women were not alone in the service of progress. The contributions from male authorities with the same message were highly appreciated, and their publications used as a strategy. It was perceived as a joint effort to envision and gradually, realize a woman-friendly future.