Educating women
Subtitle: cultural conflict and Victorian literature
By: Laura Morgan Green.
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Athens, OH
Language: eng
Number of pages: 153
Subjects: English prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Women -- Education (Higher) -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; Feminism and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century.; English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Feminist fiction, English -- History and criticism.; Women intellectuals -- Great Britain -- Biography.; Women intellectuals in literature.; Education in literature.; Heroines in literature.; Women in literature.
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred: women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines - students, teachers, and frustrated scholars - at the center of their books.".

"Educating Women analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual and professional achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals and by the forging of social rather than institutional ties.".

"Focusing on works by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Anna Leonowens, and Thomas Hardy, Laura Morgan Green demonstrates that those texts are shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education, on the one hand, and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity, on the other.

Educating Women shows that the nineteenth-century "heroines" of both history and fiction were in fact as indebted to domestic ideology as they were eager to transform it."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-148) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: One Domesticity and Duplicity: The Rhetoric of the; title: Higher Education Movement I; title: Two Living on the Moon: Jane Eyre and the Limits of; title: Self-Education 24; title: Three From English Governess to Orientalist Scholar:; title: Female Pedagogy and Power in Anna Leonowens's; title: The English Governess at the Siamese Court 46; title: Four "At once narrow and promiscuous": Emily Davies,; title: George Eliot, and Middlemarch 70; title: Five "Strange [in] difference of sex": Thomas Hardy; title: and the Temptations of Androgyny oI.