Abstract
Demonstrating how her father’s disapproval ended Julia Wedgwood’s promising career as a novelist in the 1850s, this chapter discusses Wedgwood’s Framleigh Hall (1858) and An Old Debt (1858) in light of the emotional and familial constraints that a young upper-middle-class Victorian woman faced in trying to be a novelist. Brown argues that both novels depict feminized central male characters, something to which Wedgwood’s father objected. His disapproval led her to give up writing novels with their portrayal of emotion and to turn instead to more intellectual writing on heavyweight ‘masculine’ and modern subjects such as scientific and linguistic theories. She became, as Brown observes, a noted Victorian female intellect.
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Brown, S. (2018). ‘[Your novel] quite gives me a pain in the stomach’: How Paternal Disapproval Ended Julia Wedgwood’s Promising Career as a Novelist. In: Gavin, A., de la L. Oulton, C. (eds) British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 1. British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78226-3_16
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