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Odd Women? [electronic resource] : spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s-1930s / Emma Liggins

Author
Liggins, Emma
Published
Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press, 2014.
Physical Description
viii, 275 p. ; 23 cm.
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Contents
Female redundancy, widowhood and the mid-Victorian heroine -- Bachelor girls, mistresses and the New Woman heroine -- Spinster heroines, aunts and widowed mothers, 1910-39 -- The misfit lesbian heroine of inter-war fiction -- Professional spinsters, older women and widowed heroines in the 1930s.
Summary
This genealogy of the odd woman compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women fiction and auto biography from the 1850s to the 1930s. Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as women of the future. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters in British women fiction, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book examines how women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair, E. H. young, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, challenged dominant perceptions of singleness and lesbianism in their novels, stories and autobiographies.
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ISBN
9780719087561 (hbk.)
0719087562 (hbk.)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [260]-271) and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 28886508