Readers and Mistresses - (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century) by Katie R Peel (Hardcover)

About the Book

Part recovery and part new reading method, this work locates the few kept mistresses in Victorian literature, while offering a queer way to read for their existences when less legible. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.

Book Synopsis

Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and examines the methods their authors use to encourage reader empathy. This book also usefully demonstrates how to identify kept women when they are less visible in texts, including in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Dickens' Hard Times and Dombey and Son, and George Gissing's The Odd Women.

From the Back Cover

Readers and mistresses addresses the question of what to do when someone is invisible in both official documents and literature. The book studies the women who cannot be found in marriage registries, censuses, or much of mainstream, nineteenth-century British literature.

Instead of considering kept mistresses as embodying one stage on the way to certain sex work and death, Peel uses the term 'kept woman' to unite women in a variety of kinds of keeping relationships, including some perceived as quite positive. In doing so, she offers a way to read that removes the stigma of the sexual, and appreciates the decisions of kept women as survival choices in a time and culture that actively disprivileges them.

Using recent scholarship in empathy and carework, Peel takes a queer approach to Victorian narrative and encourages an active readership. Ultimately, this queer reading offers a path of reader engagement that centers the often illegible experience of kept women, and renders readers themselves the keepers of these women's narratives. Authors included in this study are, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Gissing. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.

Review Quotes

'Readers and Mistresses is a valuable addition to criticism of the Victorian novel. It will be of interest to gender theorists and cultural historians as well as literary scholars, and fits perfectly into its series as one of Manchester's 'Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century.'
Simon Cooke, Victorian Web

About the Author

Katie R. Peel is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington