Agency, Loneliness, and the Female Protagonist in the Victorian Novel

Many female Victorian-era heroines find themselves expressing a form of loneliness directly connected to their lack of agency. Loneliness is defined by a lack, and it is this that is prevalent to these characters discussion of the social structures that define their lives. As there is no way to easily discuss a lack of agency without stating that there is something missing from the root agency, loneliness is an expression of missing components. This work analyses this lack found in loneliness as a trope to discuss a social lack. Many novels are crucial to this discussion, and this book focuses on Charlotte Brontës Villette (1853), Anne Brontës Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), George Eliots The Mill on the Floss (1860), Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles (1892), Florence Marryats The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and Ella Hepworth Dixons The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) to trace the evolution of the double use of lack in the nineteenth-century novel. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Fleeing Loneliness 3 The Lonely Protagonist 4 Loneliness as Prescription 5 Evolving Loneliness at tlie End of the Century 6 Loneliness and the New Woman 7 Conclusion Bibliography Index