TY - BOOK ID - 77893876 TI - Professional domesticity in the Victorian novel : women, work, and home PY - 1998 VL - 14 SN - 0511585268 0511008082 9780511008085 0521591414 9780511585265 9780521591416 9780521021180 0521021189 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Domestic fiction, English KW - English fiction KW - Women and literature KW - History and criticism. KW - History KW - Literature and society KW - Domestic relations in literature. KW - Occupations in literature. KW - Sex role in literature. KW - Women in literature. KW - Home in literature. KW - Work in literature. KW - Woman (Christian theology) in literature KW - Women in drama KW - Women in poetry KW - Arts and Humanities KW - Literature UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77893876 AB - Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontèˆ, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology. ER -