Women in Society and in the Novel

Abstract

In the year 1800 British women had few rights, few opportunities, and only a handful ever found an independent voice. Although the first feminist essay, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had appeared as early as 1792, it was ridiculed at the time; and for many years afterwards, except in extreme radical circles, there was very little interest in feminist ideas. The history of women in the nineteenth century shows hardly any change before the reign of Queen Victoria but much progress during it. A series of Acts of Parliament, all passed after 1837, removed most of their legal disabilities, so that by 1900, although they still had no votes, they were very much freer than they had been. Good schools and colleges for girls had begun to open and many more jobs were available. Women had begun to form their own organisations and it was widely accepted that they should take an active part in the world outside the home. There was an intense public debate, often raising issues which have emerged again in the twentieth century, about how women ought to live. ‘There can be no doubt,’ wrote an observer in 1892, ‘that the modes of thought and of life of women of all classes have altered considerably, for good or for evil, in the last hundred years.’¹