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Zusatztext Giving Women is scrupulously researched, with abundant use of archival materials, cogently argued, and beautifully written. Its impressive breadth and range will make it essential reading among literary, historical, and feminist scholars of the period. Informationen zum Autor Jill Rappoport is Assistant Professor of English at University of Kentucky. Klappentext Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage. Zusammenfassung Drawing on novels, poetry, periodicals, and political pamphlets, Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of gift exchange among English women from the 1820s until the end of the First World War. Inhaltsverzeichnis INTRODUCTION I. Women Giving II. Gifts of Writing III. Organization of the Book PART I Balanced Accounts CHAPTER 1 Literary Offerings I. Benevolent Books, Receptive Readers II. Gifts of Freedom III. Alliance and Exchange CHAPTER 2 Fictions of Reciprocity in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh I. Jane's Inheritance II. "An[other] Undowered Orphan" III. Blind Economies CHAPTER 3 Conservation in Cranford: Sympathy, Secrets, and the First Law of Thermodynamics I. The Science of Giving II. Secrets in Circulation PART II Much Obliged CHAPTER 4 The Price of Redemption in "Goblin Marke" I. Sisterhood "Beyond the Reach of Any Remuneration" II. Lizzie's Silver Penny III. The Safest Investments CHAPTER 5 Service and Savings in the Slums I. "Lower Still": Sacrifice and Sistering the Slums II. Cupboards, Chairs, and Conversion III. "Coming Down" in order to Rise Up: Risk and Asset IV. Writing the Slums CHAPTER 6 The Give and Take of "New-Woman" Eugenics I. Consuming Women, Selfish Mothers II. Bio-Altruism III. The Sacrifice of Motherhood EPILOGUE Homemade Jams and Militant Martyrs: Politics of Generosity in Campaigns for Women's Suffrage I. Appealing for the Vote II. Dying for the Vote III. A Politics of Generosity WORKS CITED ...
