Sisters and the English Household: Domesticity and Women's Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature

Description

Sisters and the English Household revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenthcentury English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Engaging scholarly histories of the family, and providing a detailed account of the 70-year Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister controversy, Anne Wallace traces an alternative domesticity anchored by adult sibling relations through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals; William Wordsworth’s poetry; Mary Lamb’s essay “On Needle-Work”; and novels by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and George Eliot. Recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative rather than contingent and dependent, and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, Sisters and the English Household resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England. Cover Front Matter Half-title Series information Title page Copyright information Dedication Table of contents Acknowledgments Chapter Int-4 Introduction Chapter 1 Alternative Domesticities: Revaluing the Sibling in the House Dorothy Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage Historians of Family, Literary Critics and Siblings in the House Chapter 2 “Out Into the Orchard”: The Departure of the Sibling in the House William Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage Mary Lamb’s Industrial Household Women’s Labor and the Lost Sister in Gaskell’s Mary Barton Chapter 3 The Problem of the Sister in the House The Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy Unmarried and Married Sisters in Dickens’s David Copperfield The Expatriate Sister in Craik’s Hannah Chapter 4 George Eliot’s Natural History of the English Family The Brother in the House Corporate Domesticity as Present and Past in Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss Industrial Domesticity as Future in Daniel Deronda End Matter Notes Introduction 1 Alternative Domesticities: Revaluing the Sibling in the House 2 “Out Into the Orchard”: The Departure of the Sibling in the House 3 The Problem of the Sister in the House 4 George Eliot’s Natural History of the English Family Works Cited Index