Definition
Victorian adventure fiction has been thought of conventionally as a male domain. However, as the century progressed, more women writers participated in the genre, including central figures such as Edith Nesbit as well as lesser known authors. The growth in women’s writing of adventure fiction owed much to the increased education of women, including the development of girls’ boarding schools, and the impact of the periodical press, which saw a rise in periodicals targeting young girls.
Introduction
Adventure fiction in the Victorian period has been conventionally understood as a man’s business: while male writers wrote stories of action involving heroes embroiled in plots about the making of history and empire, women writers tended to write domestic stories about the making of the family home. It is not surprising that women writers focused on the domestic given that, as Gilbert and Gubar note, they often experienced a kind of collective “agoraphobia” caused by “patriarchal...
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References
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Parkes, C. (2020). Adventure. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_149-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_149-1
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