Description
Book SynopsisCorbett shows how the domestic fiction of novelists including Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf reflected the shifting boundaries of "family" and even helped refine those borders.
Trade ReviewCorbett's readings of Victorian novels are informed by Foucault and Judith Butler, and illuminated by intersecting contemporary economic, religious, racial, class, biological, and anthropological discourses. Drawing on a fascinating range of primary documentation, she emphasizes the 'stringent limits to what we can know,' pointing out, for example, that incestuous sexual abuse came to be regarded as a working-class, or 'savage,' phenomenon partly because white middle-class homes escaped surveillance. One of Corbett's strengths lies in her determination to contest 'static versions of the past' and expose its 'messiness and complexity' in order to gain a better understanding of the ways in which women authors invoked and modified fictions of kinship.
-- Miranda El-Rayess * Times Literary Supplement *
In this beautifully written, well-argued book, Corbett confronts the puzzling status of 'incest' in the 19th century. Victorian England had no laws against a man's having sex with his own sister or child but prohibited a widower from marrying the sister of his late wife. Beginning with this paradox, Corbett looks at how 'family' was defined legally, morally, and socially between the time of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.... Corbett undertakes a series of readings, not just of novels and juvenilia by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf, but also of legal discourse about marriage, scientific inquiry into how breeding works, and late-19th-century anthropological theories identifying incest as that which separates the 'savage' from the 'civilized.' In her conclusion, Corbett draws connections between Victorian thought on the constitution of the family and current debates over gay marriage. This book will benefit historians of the family as well as scholars and students of Victorian and modern British literature. Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Table of Contents1. Making and Breaking the Rules: An Introduction2. "Cousins in Love, &c." in Jane Austen3. Husband, Wife, and Sister: Making and Unmaking the Early Victorian Family4. Orphan Stories: Adoption and Affinity in Charlotte Brontë5. Intercrossing, Interbreeding, and The Mill on the Floss6. Fictive Kinship and Natural Affinities in Wives and Daughters7. Virginia Woolf and Victorian "Incests"Conclusion
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