‘At the very turn of life’ in 1860s Fiction
‘At the very turn of life’ in 1860s Fiction
This chapter investigates questions of a woman's identity. It examines a series of 1860s novels that represent young heroines in the process of thinking through — and gradually testing out — what kind of women they would like to become. It begins by presenting fictions that shadow a heroine's frenzied transitional stage with a narrative of obscured or mistaken identity. It then focuses on the place (and displacement) of marriage in romance texts' explorations of identity acquisition. It identifies the patterns women novelists themselves made to articulate the complicated process, for a young mid-Victorian woman, of acquiring a sense of herself as adult.
Keywords: identity acquisition, transitional stage, mid-Victorian, romance, marriage, women novelists
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
