Women Novelists of the Later Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Women novelists writing after 1850 could hardly have been unaware of ‘the woman question’. Most of them, right up to the end of the century, continued conservative. But more and more of them began to question the principles of complete submission to parents and husbands, and the idea that an unmarried girl should stay at home. By the last quarter of the century women’s rights were a very topical issue, and feminist and anti-feminist writers appeared.