Reader, I married him: A study of the women characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot

by Patricia Beer

The first chapter describes such circumstances in the lives of the novelists themselves as would be likely to influence their attitudes to the Woman Question, as it was beginning to be their homes, their temperaments, their education, their careers as writers. The next four chapters largely abandon the biographical approach and concentrate critically on the novels as novels and in particular on the way in which the authors present not only their heroines but also their minor women characters. They portray a wide range of feminine experience, which is significant partly as social information and comment but more importantly as an integral element in the novelists' tone and methods. At a time when the cause of female emancipation was being increasingly discussed in real life, women writers, and these four especially, were far from single-minded about it, and the resultant ambiguities in their work are of great artistic moment.

Genres: Nonfiction, Jane Austen, Feminism, Books About Books

213 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Elizzy B]

If you like articles about English literature, and you love Austen, Brontes, Gaskell and Eliot, you should run to look for this book!

[Lindenblatt]

Charlotte Brontë could not see the point of Jane Austen, George Eliot could not see the point of 'Jane Eyre', and Elizabeth Gaskell was distressed that George Eliot was not really Mrs Lewes.

A detailed study of the women characters of the four best-known female English writers of the 19th century. With many examples and quotes from the authoresses' works, beware of spoilers! Informative, well written and very readable. No rating, but around 3.5 stars.

[Al]

This is a very well-written and well-organized book, and worth the time to read; Beer uses a great number of quotations from the various works to illustrate her points. The first chapter gives an overview of the authoresses and their works and Beers devotes a chapter to each one: Austen, Bronte, Gaskell and Eliot. Beer examines how each authoress develops the female characters in their works, and how these characters relate to the social and political conditions and restrictions on women in the Victorian era. The characterizations found in Bronte, Gaskell and Eliot were very similar, and Beer pointed out the contrasts with Austen. Beer references almost all of the works written by each woman, which forced me to become familiar with these books, since, apart from Jane Austen, I have only read one work each from Bronte, Gaskell and Eliot. This is a book of straightforward scholarship, with no social or political axe-grinding, and it makes me want to go back to the works to try to see what Beer was talking about.

[Mindy Schaper]

An analysis of my favorite novels. What could be better?

[John Mazzoni]

good study