Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel

Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of fictional narratives, to show how domestic work gained social credibility through the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. Her study questions the stereotypes of Victorian domesticity, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.

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Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.