Title: Owning property, being property
Description: Drawing from three disparate centuries and places and representing three distinct legal models of female ownership, this dissertation examines the ways in which women have written about marriage in the context of their ability or inability to own property in their own name. In two of these cases, women experienced a marked change in their fortunes. One was in twelfth-century France, where women generally lost the rights they once had both to own and to pass on their property. The other was in England, where the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 gave women legal ownership over their own property. In the third case, mid-nineteenth-century Russia, women had always owned land and serfs. I argue that when women can own property, their narratives differ remarkably from those of women who cannot.

Their female protagonists reject marriage as easily as they choose it. Furthermore, the marriage plot is not central to their narratives. In all three periods, women writers use their texts to negotiate the line between being property and owning property and, in doing so, question marriage as the marker of female identity. Literature thus becomes the site for women to work out their views on marriage; through literature and authorship, they write their rights. This project is the first to examine different historical contexts to see how women negotiate their marital status as property in relation to their ability to own property. Although a vast body of legal and historical scholarship on women's property rights exists, no studies have attempted to compare different ownership models, nor has marriage as a theme in women's literature been used to analyze the issue comparatively.