Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empire

Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empire investigates the ways domesticity shapes and threatens female characters in British fiction from the 1750s to the 1850s. Going far beyond the well-trod ground of the marriage plot, women writers in this period explored complicated issues such as sexual abuse, grief, and the way coverture and inheritance laws challenged women's survival. The author argues that women writers used the novel as a space where they could confront anxieties about the precarity of domesticity and the implicit threat of homelessness many women of the middle ranks faced. Precarious Domesticity explores the way female characters subvert these dynamics by reordering domestic space to enact ingenious and creative resistances to their marginalization in Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Brontë. The author also explores the implications of British imperialism's impact on domestic ideology, both in the consumer products imported into England and the wealth derived from plantation slavery and global trade made possible by enslaved labor. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Domestic Disruption in the British Novel Chapter 1: Competing Visions of Domestic Agency in Jane Collier and Sarah Scott Chapter 2: Negotiating Inheritance in Frances Burney’s Cecilia Chapter 3: Domestic Assemblages in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Chapter 4: Independence and the Inhospitable Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South Chapter 5: Professional Domesticity in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette Coda: Reimaginings Bibliography Index About the Author