Pressure to work : middle-class women's paid and unpaid labour in Victorian domestic fiction

During the Victorian period, the issue of middle-class women’s work was widely-debated as work activists encouraged ladies to engage in unpaid work as a contribution to society, or work for a living if they were poor. This pressure for women to do something useful was met with strong opposition, yet, work reformers challenged this resistance with various strategies and even demanded for more spheres of work for middle-class women. Victorian journalists, essayists, and fiction-writers responded to the work debate with much ambivalence, and female domestic fiction writers began employing the trope of the middle-class woman undertaking paid and unpaid work in their novels. This study shall draw on three novels: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Evre (1847), Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), and Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Rebel of the Family (1880) to analyse the crucial but still neglected ambiguity in female domestic fiction authors’ responses to the issue of work so as to broaden our understanding of the impact of domestic fiction on women’s labour during the Victorian period. As these novels were written at different points from the mid- to late-Victorian period, this study is able to analyse and account for the changes and development of the authors’ attitudes towards the overarching issues in these three texts.Master of Arts (HSS