Women's Voices in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell 1810-1865 (Women's Studies)

Dr. Camus' study first tries to reinstate Gaskell as one of the significant novelists of the mid Victorian period through looking at her work as a whole, avoiding the usual dividing line between her condition-of-England novels and her more intimate fiction. It then aims at inscribing Gaskell in the tradition of women writers who wrote not only for literary posterity but also to express and defend a woman's vision of the world. The feminist aspect of Gaskell's writing is uncovered here in all its determination but also in its hesitations.