When four women rent a villa in Italy for a month, they find their lives changed for the better as a result—especially their love lives—in this example of romance fiction. Elizabeth Von Arnim narrates this story through the third-person omniscient… Read More ›
gender roles in literature
Analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward
Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward was one of three novels Scott issued in 1823. The first edition was printed in 10,000 copies, the sheets carried in bales by steamship to London on May 16, 1823, where binders worked the night… Read More ›
Analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor
Although written in 1846, Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, The Professor, would not be published until after her 1855 death. Clearly autobiographical, it served as a model for her later, more fully developed version of her experiences in Brussels as a… Read More ›
Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
Anthony Trollope published the fourth entry in his Palliser series, Phineas Redux, first as a serial in The Graphic between July 1873 and January 1874. It appeared seven years after its predecessor, Phineas Finn, which introduced the adventurous protagonist named… Read More ›
Analysis of Fanny Burney’s Evelina
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
Analysis of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
The last of George Eliot’s seven novels, published in eight parts between February and September 1876, Daniel Deronda has a double structure that follows two protagonists, Daniel Deronda and Gwendolyn Harleth, in their intertwined search for self-fulfillment. Eliot breaks new… Read More ›
Analysis of George Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career
George Meredith’s 1876 novel, Beauchamp’s Career, appeared serially in The Fortnightly Review between August 1874 and December 1875, becoming notable for its keen insight into the politics of England at the century’s end. It features the life of a politician,… Read More ›
Analysis of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh
Called by critics a confessional “novel in verse,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh represented a sustained cry for human intellectual and creative freedom, more specifically, for women’s independence. A Künstlerroman, or story of the maturation of a young writer, the… Read More ›
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