Barbara Bodichon Research Articles

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement, by Arianne Chernock

Reviewed by: The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement by Arianne Chernock Barbara Caine (bio) The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement, by Arianne Chernock; pp. xi + 249. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Historians' interest in Queen Victoria shows no sign of diminishing. If anything, it has increased, but with a changed focus. No longer does the life of the queen attract attention, nor even her role within the government and the state. What is significant now is rather how Queen Victoria was seen by different groups and in different contexts. This question of how the image of Queen Victoria was "leveraged" by both supporters and opponents of women's rights to further their causes is the focus of Arianne Chernock's engaging new study, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement (9). Neither those who drew on Queen Victoria to support their claims for women's rights, nor those who used her image to make the opposing case, sought the queen's active involvement in their causes or had any clear idea of her views on the subject. Well into the 1870s, Chernock argues, "the queen remained a screen onto which subjects subscribing to wildly different propositions on sex and gender could project their beliefs" (63). Her lack of support for women's rights is now well known, but, as Chernock points out, the British public remained largely unaware until the 1870s when Theodore Martin, in his Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (1875), cited a private letter by the queen stating her belief that "we women are not made for governing" (qtd. in Chernock 153). Her displeasure at "this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's rights'" was also expressed in a private letter to Martin and published by him—to support the anti-suffrage position in 1902 (qtd. in Chernock 194). The use of female monarchs by radicals seeking democratic reforms, and especially rights for women, was widespread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such that those supporting women's rights "were primed to see the young Victoria in a hopeful light" (41). Radical Unitarians and Chartists, alongside the women involved in Langham Place and the early supporters of women's suffrage, frequently drew on Victoria's image in pamphlets, speeches, and articles to support their views. Drawing on the writings of many individuals, including Barbara Bodichon, Helen Taylor, and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Chernock explores the different ways in which Queen Victoria provided an example of how it was possible for women to combine private and public duties and responsibilities, as devoted wife and mother as well as queen. She was also used as an illustration of the fact that the demand for political rights for women was in accordance with the principles of the British Constitution. [End Page 314] Still, supporters of women's rights did not have it all their own way. On the contrary, their opponents made more effective use of Queen Victoria by casting her example into a framework for questioning the power and capacity of female monarchs more broadly and for redefining the monarchy itself when held by a woman. While advocates of women's rights turned to the example of Queen Elizabeth as an earlier illustration of female capacity for rule, their opponents insisted rather on the importance of her counselors, especially Lord Burghley, in Elizabethan governance. Queen Elizabeth, in the opinion of conservative historians like James Anthony Froude and Goldwin Smith, was merely a figurehead: when a queen was on the throne, it was the men around her who exercised real power. The same argument was only too easily made with regard to Queen Victoria due to the presence of Prince Albert, who was "King to all intents and purposes" in the eyes of some (qtd. in Chernock 103). In the book's most interesting chapter, Chernock shows how discussion around the powers and prerogatives of the monarch increasingly were gendered within many political and legal circles in the...

Poetry at the Priory: George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism

Poetry at the Priory:George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism Kathleen Mccormack (bio) As George Eliot was nearing the age of fifty, she conceived a daring ambition. She wanted to become one of the superior poets of her time and place, as beloved and respected as Browning and Tennyson.1 Having finished Felix Holt in 1866, for three years she wrote line after line of lyrics, sonnets, rhymed couplets, and blank verse and did not begin seriously on Middlemarch until 1869. With The Spanish Gypsy finally in print in 1868, she continued to publish poetry during the early years of the next decade, including poetry which, like many of the long poems by her contemporaries, engages topics directly or indirectly relevant to British imperialism.2 Several circumstances and events shared by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes during the 1870s helped nourish her poetic ambitions. After buying their country home near Tennyson's Aldworth in 1876, their friendship with the laureate flourished just as he too was trying out a new genre: five-act historical dramas written for the stage. Meanwhile, the Leweses continued to host their Sunday salons, occasions that attracted sometimes overlapping groups including Lewes's fellow proto-psychologists; educators involved in women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge; George Eliot's often younger women friends; visual artists (Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Burton, Barbara Bodichon, Helen Allingham, George du Maurier); dozens of periodical editors and contributors; people usually identified as Pre-Raphaelites; singers sometimes invited to perform—and poets of lasting or temporary fame who turned out lyrics, sonnets, and ballads, as well as dramas and narratives many thousands of lines long. While music eventually became more frequent and guests with political similarities and differences still mingled, the poets helped keep Sunday at the Priory primarily a literary salon. Finally, the Leweses were at this time sustaining their friendship with the world's most prominent human symbol of the Victorian empire, the queen's viceroy in India, Lord Robert Lytton, who also wrote long poems, notably King Poppy. After several years of epistolary discussions with Lewes about Lytton's [End Page 115] writing and strategies for publication (1865–1876), Lewes switched to delivering epistolary advice regarding two of Lytton's worst challenges as viceroy and governor general of India: famine and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Concerning these disasters, during the last two years of his life, Lewes came close to turning eminence grise to the viceroy who was representing the newly named Empress of India. Discussions of the kind and degree of imperialist ideology lurking in the late writing of Eliot have most often concerned the ending to Daniel Deronda, in which Daniel and Mirah depart for "the East" with unspecified intentions that may or may not include colonization of a land already occupied by non-Jewish groups.3 Although Eliot leaves the future of Daniel and Mirah undescribed, she delivers the couple to the only setting where they might fulfill Mordecai's hopes for founding a Jewish homeland that will thrive under Daniel's leadership. Meanwhile, during the years she was writing Deronda, she also created Deronda-esque characters in her poetry. Additional versions of such characters and their plots recur in long poems by friends and Priory visitors, as exemplified by William Allingham's Lawrence Bloomfield, Tennyson's Harold, and Lytton's own King Poppy. Nancy Henry's definitive study of George Eliot and the British Empire not only details the Deronda debate but also cautions that Eliot's biography supplies additional connections between Eliot and Britain's colonies (p. 3). Henry specifies heavy investments in particular in railway stocks in India and argues that Lewes's sons' emigration to Africa (unhappily ending in the deaths of both Thornie and Bertie) nevertheless demonstrates a willingness to draw on the colonies as resources for placing younger sons. Only Thornie's failure at the required civil service exam redirected him from India to Natal. Eliot's poetic ambitions and her late-1870s friendships create additional biographical connections between Eliot and India, many of them fortified by interactions at her Sunday salons. Writers of long poetry who might visit at the Priory during the 1870s included Browning and Tennyson...

Narrative Agency at the Interface of Embodiment and Emotions: The North-American Epistolary Diary of Barbara Bodichon

ABSTRACT Body and emotions have traditionally been contentious sources of (self-)knowledge in epistemological debates—often regarded as impediments to rational thinking and autonomous moral decisions. Drawing on feminist philosophers who have sought to bring back body and emotions as central elements in the constitution of the self and the world (Catriona Mackenzie, Alison Jaggar, Kym Maclaren and Sara Ahmed), this paper unpacks how the interaction body-emotions can act as a (problematic) source of female agency. To do so, it examines the epistolary diary which mid-Victorian English feminist, artist and philanthropist Barbara Bodichon wrote during her honeymoon in North-America (1857–1858). This paper teases out the extent to which Bodichon’s lived affective encounters during her honeymoon were translated into an ambiguous narrative outcome: an agentic epistolary self-projection that concomitantly essentialised Others in her descriptions of North-American society.

Barbara Bodichon’s epistolary archive: silences that speak

ABSTRACT Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and imbalance as a handicap, this paper argues that the silences her epistolary archive contains can be turned into a meaningful source of information and thus are methodologically relevant. To do so, it examines the extent to which Bodichon herself might have introduced silences ([un]consciously) as a strategy to exercise power over her own narrative. In order to tease out these epistolary silences and make them speak, this paper reads them through the lens of Lisa Mazzei’s poetics of silence.

George Eliot, Opium, and the Ambience of European Cities

In December 1860 George Eliot wrote to Barbara Bodichon, ‘I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other church has presented. … The highest “calling and election” is to do without opium and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.’1 This might reasonably be supposed to be not a reference to personal experience of opium but merely an employment of an analogy that was by no means original: George Eliot is unlikely to have been familiar with Karl Marx’s claim in 1844 that ‘Religion … is the opium of the people’, but almost certainly knew of Novalis’s earlier formulation, Ihre sogenannte Religion wirkt bloss wie ein Opiat: reizend, betäubend, Schmerzen aus Schwäche stillend’, their so-called religion functions simply as an opiate, stimulating numbing, calming pain by means of weakness.’2 On the other hand, part of a letter of George Eliot’s to John Sibree of March 1848 does sound very much like an account of a sustained dosing with laudanum or some other preparation of opium: a messenger of Satan was sent in the guise of a headache and directly on the back of that a face-ache, so that I have been a mere victim of sensations memories and visions for the last week. I am even now, as you may imagine, in a shattered limbo-like mental condition.3

Barbara Bodichon’s travel writing: her epistolary articulation of Bildung

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel letters as sources of learning, this paper studies Bodichon’s correspondence as epistolary articulations of her Bildung (self-cultivation). It argues that, conforming to Bildung’s idea of forging one’s individuality in interaction with the world, her travelling provided her with a variety of settings through which she extended towards the unknown and incorporated it into her sense of being. In turn, letters functioned as forums where she made sense of encountering the difference through which she individualised her subjectivity. Notwithstanding, a revised reading of Bildung permits teasing out to what extent Bodichon’s self-cultivation was developed at the expense of certain social categories.

‘More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express’: Barbara Bodichon's Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections

‘More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express’: Barbara Bodichon's Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections

Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century

This article recounts the stories told about Véronique Eugénie Allix-Luce and her school for Muslim girls founded in Algiers in 1845. Drawing on English feminist writings, including correspondence and travel narratives, it explores how women, such as Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes, constructed this French schoolteacher as a modern day heroine. French colonial authorities and women's travel narratives provide a more complicated portrait and reveal the weight of cultural and gender politics within the French ‘civilising mission’ that ultimately erased the memory of this initiative. By retelling the story of Mme Luce's school through the double perspective of British and French contemporaries, the article offers insight into the disappearance of women's roles in the French story of Algerian colonisation.

Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle, 1820-1960, by Gillian Sutherland

Reviewed by: Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960 Valerie Sanders (bio) Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind: The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960, by Gillian Sutherland; pp. vii + 262. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, £40.00, $70.00. In 1886 Blanche Athena Clough, daughter of poet Arthur Hugh Clough and niece of the founding mother of Newnham College, Cambridge, recorded hating her fellow creatures so fiercely that she went about longing for "the sensation of a long knife going into my left side" (115). Besides this and her father's black depressions, the Cloughs encountered bankruptcy, abandoned their religious faith, enjoyed both spectacularly long and spectacularly short lives, and produced two women activists for higher education. The story of "Annie" and "Thena," as Gillian Sutherland fully demonstrates, merges with the evolution of women's professions and university access; their experiences, though highly idiosyncratic, reflect the wider developments of their society. Sutherland concludes: "A study of the Cloughs and their circle is an exploration of the slow emergence of middle-class women from the private domestic sphere to which the dominant ideology of the first half of the nineteenth century had confined them" (212). By the time the last Clough woman, Thena's adoptive daughter, Kitty Duff, grew up, the family assumed she would go to Newnham College and work for her living, whereas the first, Anne Jemima, spent half of her life wondering how to survive, both financially and psychologically, with no clear path ahead of her. In the end, she established a series of small domestic schools for girls, while Newnham began as a safe and chaperoned house for women wanting to attend open lectures in Cambridge. Once Arthur Hugh died in 1861, the story of the Cloughs is essentially that of the family's women and their widening circle of close friends and supporters. The 140 years spanned by the dates in the subtitle remarkably cover only two lives—the start of Annie's and the end of Thena's—but the changes they witnessed mark the end of Victorian attitudes towards higher education for women and the start of something recognisably like the modern age. The "Faith, Duty, and the Power of Mind" of the book's title aptly summarize the changing priorities of the family. Histories of influential families like the Cloughs, the Stephens, or the Stracheys (all were intertwined) remind us of how the English establishment was run by networks of cousins and siblings who between them shifted ideological ground in ways that had a lasting impact, though they often had a hard battle to change public opinion. It was her brother's marriage into a family that included Florence Nightingale, Barbara Bodichon, the Bonham-Carters, and her own connections with the "Langham Place set" that helped steer Annie towards the founding of Newnham, and Thena to a continuation of her work amidst diehard opposition. Sutherland describes the anti-women riots that broke out at Cambridge in 1921, when Senate voted to exclude women from full membership of the University and the gates of Newnham were vandalised in celebration. Despite their temperamental differences, both the Clough aunt and niece persevered and presided over a steadily growing institution whose academic success proved that women deserved to be full members of Cambridge University. The Clough family had largely failed its women: the men had left them financially unprotected (Thena never even saw her father, who died in Italy three months after she was born), whereas the institution of Newnham became an alternative family made up of substitute sisters and mothers, including Philippa Fawcett, with whom Thena travelled to [End Page 369] India, Japan, and Canada on what must have been a truly liberating tour. Sutherland asks the question she supposes must be lurking in her reader's mind: should these intense friendships between women be seen as lesbian? Admitting that some did have what she calls "a powerful erotic charge" (201), she argues that such friendships operated on a model more finely nuanced and emotionally rich than their equivalent today, especially for women whose family connections had failed them in some way.That the...

Negotiating a self: Barbara Bodichon in America and Algiers

Negotiating a self: Barbara Bodichon in America and Algiers

GEORGE ELIOT AND THE COLONIES

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2

Becoming part of History: Retrieving the Lives of Emily Davies and Victorian Feminists

The biographer's craft is analogous to that of the mosaicist, who creates a picture out of tiny fragments of coloured enamel. In this story the letters to and from and about Barbara Bodichon are the most brilliantly coloured fragments. Census material, documents from public record offices and legal documents . . . are the pieces with less lustre, though still necessary . . . Sometimes fragments are missing altogether; if so, I have tried not to replace them with pasteboard, but simply to allow the cement ground of the narrative to remain exposed in an undecorated state (Hirsch )

Nineteenth-Century American Feminist Economics: From Caroline Dall to Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1898) and Economics stands as a landmark in the feminist economic analysis of gender relations and increasingly is also recognized as a pioneering work of American institutionalist economics (see Mary Ann Dimand, 1995). Because it stands out so strongly as a major contribution, and Economics has been perceived as an isolated work, apart from links to Lester Ward's sociology and parallels with the contemporary writings of Thorstein Veblen. This paper, however, views and Economics as the culmination of four decades of American feminist economic thought, beginning with Caroline Dall and Virginia Penny, and draws attention to Gilman's connection with that tradition through Helen Campbell. This tradition is so little known that the names of these four women do not even appear in Dorothy Ross's (1991) excellent Origins of American Social Science, even though Dall founded the American Social Science Association (ASSA), referred to by Ross (1991 p. 63) as the mother of associations, including the American Economic Association, and even though Campbell won a prize from the American Economic Association for Wage-Earners (Campbell, 1893), which was published with an introduction by Richard T. Ely. Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912) first became interested in feminism in 1837-1838 as a result of Harriet Martineau's (1837) chapter on The Political Non-existence of Women in the United States and an address on women's rights given at the Boston Lyceum by Amasa Walker, an underground railway activist soon to become professor of political economy at Oberlin. In 1841, Dall (then Caroline Healey) attended a series of ten weekly conversations led by the feminist author Margaret Fuller, publishing her notes of these conversations more than half a century later. While teaching school in Georgetown in the early 1840's before her marriage, she undertook the first census of free blacks in the District of Columbia, in order to organize schools for them, and in the early 1850s, while living in Toronto (where her husband was a Unitarian minister), she acted as Canadian agent for a society aiding fugitive slaves. Dall remained in her native Boston with her two children when her husband sailed to India as a missionary (where he stayed for the remaining 30 years of his life). She reported to a women's rights convention in Boston in 1855 on the legal status of women, following with a series of annual reports on that status, and with organization of the New England Rights Convention in Boston in 1859. A precursor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman among American feminists, Dall went beyond the suffrage question and unequal laws on property rights to a critique of the economic role of women in a series of three public lectures in Boston in November 1859, published as Woman's Right to Labor; or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860). Together with two series of lectures on women's right to education and rights under the law, this series was incorporated in Dall's major work, College, the Market, and the Courts; or Women's Relation to Education, Labor, and the Law (1867). Dall (1867 [1972 p. 179]) attributed women' s discontent to restricted opportunities for paid employment, for it was no longer the case that every woman found, in spinning, weaving, and sewing in the active life of a ... household, full employment for time and thought. In moving from a survey of women's unequal legal status to a critique of women' s repressed economic role, Dall followed the same path as the British activist Barbara Bodichon (whose 1859 pamphlet, and Work, appeared in a revised American edition in 1959) and, later, Jeanne Chauvin (1892) in France. * Department of Economics, Brock University, St. Ca tharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada (e-mail: dimandCc adam.econ.brocku.ca).

What's Missing: Lacunae in the Life and Letters of George MacDonald

What’s Missing: Lacunae in the Life and Letters of George MacDonald Roderick McGillis Rolland Hein. George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker. Nashville, TN: Star Song, 1993. Glenn Edward Sadler, ed. An Expression of Character: The Letters of George MacDonald. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994. My copy of George MacDonald’s Exotics (1876) contains the following inscription: “To my friend Sir Noel Paton with love and thanks. George MacDonald.” I have owned this book for years, and treasured the inscription. MacDonald’s presentation of the book to Sir Noel Paton has, however, piqued my curiosity. This is because none of the biographies of MacDonald contains a single reference to Sir Noel Paton; as far as I know, no letters between these two friends are extant. Both men were from Scotland, and to a certain extent they moved in similar circles. Yet their friendship remains one of the mysteries of MacDonald’s biography. There are others. I was reminded of this when I read the new books by Hein and Sadler. Neither book clears away the mysteries from MacDonald’s life; in fact, they compound these mysteries. First let me set out some of the mysteries evident to a student of MacDonald’s life. Perhaps most frustrating to a reader interested in MacDonald’s fiction is the lack of commentary in his letters on such things as the literature of his own day, his own writing, and subjects of a critical nature generally. What did MacDonald think of the work of such contemporaries as George Meredith or George Eliot, or the Rossettis? His [End Page 282] connection with Charles Dodgson and Arthur Hughes indicates he was at least on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite set, yet he has nothing to say about these artists. His friendship with Ruskin was obviously intimate, yet again he has little to say about Ruskin as thinker, art historian, or economic theorist. More frustrating to those of us interested in children’s literature is MacDonald’s complete silence on writers he clearly knew or must have known about, writers such as Mary Molesworth, Dinah Mulock (later Dinah Craik), Jean Ingelow, or Frances Hodgson Burnett. We know from his published writing-novels and essays-something of his ideas on education and child life, but what did he make of Rousseau or Pestalozzi or Froebel? He cites the Kabbalah in Lilith and lie knew prominent Swedenborgians such as Garth Wilkinson and Henry Sutton, but what did he know of Swedenborg and the occult writers generally’? He read William Law, but how intimate was lie with the work of Jacob Boehme? We know from his novel David Elginbrod (1863) and from a few letters that concern a certain spiritualist who attended the Broadlands conferences that he disapproved of some forms of spiritualist activity, but we also know he was attracted to notions of the second sight and to ideas associated with the hermetic tradition, but we do not know just how deeply he might have been influenced by such ideas. A glance at the “Index of Subjects” in Sadler’s collection of MacDonald letters will show how few references he makes to his own work, and even when he does mention one of his works, as for instance in his well-known assertion that The Princess and the Goblin “is as good work of the kind as I can do, and I think will be the most complete thing I have done” (Sadler 174), he does so briefly and without offering anything of interpretive import. Finally, MacDonald rarely enters into an expository discussion of literature or art or criticism. Equally intriguing are the absences in MacDonald’s letters and records. For example, why do we have no letters between Arthur Hughes and MacDonald? Where are the letters to and from such people the biographers tell us MacDonald knew well, people such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, Garth Wilkinson, Henry Sutton, Alexander Munro, Edward Burne-Jones, F. D. Maurice, Alexander Strahan, Elizabeth Garret, Barbara Bodichon, Octavia Hill, or Margaret Oliphant? And the list could grow longer. One letter does exist from Matthew Arnold to MacDonald (it is in Yale University’s Beineke collection of MacDonald...

George Eliot as Literary Widow

When George Henry Lewes died on 30 November 1878, George Eliot considered herself his widow. Had they not lived as man and wife for almost twenty-five years believing that their happiness harmed neither society nor his wife and children? Were they not, as George Eliot said, united by sacred bond'1 But to expect everyone to share this conviction would have been unrealistic, and George Eliot was not one to flinch from harsh truths. Early in her union with Lewes their anomalous position in society had caused her some uneasiness, and she had fashioned her life to accommodate it, avoiding engagements that might prove embarrassing. Subsequent literary success had given her more self-confidence, but she had continued to monitor her social life carefully, and remained less inclined to accept invitations than to receive guests at home, with Lewes acting as impresario. His meant that she would have to consider just what her new social identity would be, and consciously or unconsciously to fashion her behavior in the months of her mourning to establish it. This period in her life has not received the attention it deserves if we are to appreciate her strengths both as woman and as writer.2 George Eliot was not totally unprepared for her fate that Saturday in the Priory, their London house near the Regent's Canal, when Lewes died shortly before six in the evening. He had been under the doctor's care for intestinal symptoms that had become alarming in the previous few days, and she had written to her old friend Barbara Bodichon of having a deep sense of change within, and of permanently closer companionship with death (7: 84). Yet when the end finally came, the reality of her loss so overwhelmed her that she gave vent to grief in ways that seem extreme today but were less remarkable in Victorian times. She was too distraught to attend the funeral in Highgate Cem-

Victorian feminism and Gissing's the odd women: ‘why are women redundant?’

Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) has variously been considered as feminist and also as anti-feminist. Here it will be argued that irrespective of the ideological stance of the novel, it may be seen as a close and realistic rendition of certain feminist issues. This can be observed via an examination of some important statements by Victorian feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Jessie Boucherett on the subject of ‘superfluous’ women and work. They were concerned, firstly, with the articulation of the problem and its opposition to the ornamental view of women, and, secondly, with practical solutions and their implementation. It is into this second area that Gissing's novel may be seen to fit, providing a close fictional analogy with the activities of the Langham Place Circle.