edited by Janet Murray
As this fascinating anthology of writing by and about women in 19th-century England proves, there is much more myth than history in the notion of Victorian females as passive, knew-their-place drones. Murray, who teaches literature and women's studies at MIT, includes some essays by men. Charles Dickens, represented by letters about the home he supervised for women found "wandering about the streets in degradation," evidences a thoughtless paternalism. Philosopher John Stuart Mill renounces a husband's traditional dominant role just preceding his own marriage to his longtime mistress, Harriet Taylor, whose feminism (and Mills adds, her "unrivalled wisdom") inspired his considerable efforts on behalf of women. Most of the book, though, contains the words of the women themselves. London housewife Grace Foakes writes about cleaning the doorstep. Emma Sheppard, wife of a magistrate, describes a prostitute her husband convicted and she tried to reform: "If there was a heart in this poor, wretched, oft-convicted, scorned creature, why should we not seek and find the same in others?" Novelist Charlotte Brontë writes, "There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly—without support of husband or brother." Gloria Steinem could not have said it better. (Pantheon, $22.50; paper, $11.95)
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