Abstract
Women played a central role in nineteenth-century local, national, and global economies because of how they invested their capital. The female investor was familiar to Victorians and widely represented in realist fiction. Both real and fictional women investors complicate models of separate gendered spheres. The history of women’s financial lives is as important as the romance or marriage plots through which their stories are usually told. These arguments challenge more familiar narratives of capitalism and culture in which women’s exclusion is assumed. It thus offers new and revised perspectives on the relationship between finance, literature, and biography.
[A] woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.
—Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, A brief summary, in plain language of the most important laws concerning women: Together with a few observations thereon
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Henry, N. (2018). Introduction. In: Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94331-2_1
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