1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154309603321

Autore

Liggins Emma

Titolo

Odd Women? : spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s-1930s

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Manchester : , : Manchester University Press, , 2015

ISBN

1-78170-685-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource

Classificazione

HG 431

HL 2045

HL 2865

HM 4815

Disciplina

810/820

Soggetti

English fiction - History and criticism - 19th century

English fiction - History and criticism - 20th century

English fiction - Women authors - History and criticism

Women in literature

Single women in literature

Widows in literature

Lesbians in literature

English

Languages & Literatures

English Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

Women outside marriage between 1850 and the Second World War were seen as abnormal, threatening, superfluous and incomplete, whilst also being hailed as 'women of the future'. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book considers how Victorian



and modernist women's writing challenged the heterosexual plot and reconfigured conceptualisations of public and private space in order to valorise female oddity.