The prison of womanhood: four provincial heroines in nineteenth-century fiction

By examining heroines created by two female and two male novelists the author explores the issue of whether there is a feminine creative sensibility in the heroines and, if so, in what way it reflects the sensibility of the four writers to whom they are so close. Front Matter....Pages i-viii ‘Emma’s Daughters’: a Study in Isolation and Creativity....Pages 1-17 Emma Woodhouse: Self-portrait of a Lady....Pages 18-41 Emma Bovary: Muse in a Shop Window....Pages 42-80 Dorothea Brooke: the Reluctant Aesthete....Pages 81-113 Isabel Archer: the Architect of Consciousness....Pages 114-138 Epilogue....Pages 139-141 Back Matter....Pages 142-169