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Dear Faustina
A story of social manners.
In Dear Faustina (1897), Rhoda Broughton positions the New Woman as a morbid and immoral sexual predator, who permanently taints Victorian middleclass sisterhood by transgressively merging the roles of lover and sister, and whose victims can only be truly rescued from the New Woman's degenerate sexuality by the heteronormative institution of marriage and reform work modeled on the middle-class home. This anti-New Woman novels explores late-Victorian anxieties about women's increasing involvement in the public sphere through reform work and concerns over the passionate nature of women's relationships with other women in the organizations they formed to do philanthropic work. Acknowledging the compelling nature of reform work for middle-class women and yet also highlighting danger of the class and sexual boundary crossing encouraged by such work, Broughton seeks to provide a new model of heterosexual marriage that allows women to do social reform work within a semi-private, domestic, and paternalistic model.
In Dear Faustina (1897), Rhoda Broughton positions the New Woman as a morbid and immoral sexual predator, who permanently taints Victorian middleclass sisterhood by transgressively merging the roles of lover and sister, and whose victims can only be truly rescued from the New Woman's degenerate sexuality by the heteronormative institution of marriage and reform work modeled on the middle-class home. This anti-New Woman novels explores late-Victorian anxieties about women's increasing involvement in the public sphere through reform work and concerns over the passionate nature of women's relationships with other women in the organizations they formed to do philanthropic work. Acknowledging the compelling nature of reform work for middle-class women and yet also highlighting danger of the class and sexual boundary crossing encouraged by such work, Broughton seeks to provide a new model of heterosexual marriage that allows women to do social reform work within a semi-private, domestic, and paternalistic model.
440 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1897
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About the author
Rhoda Broughton
208 books13 followersRhoda Broughton was a popular British (Welsh) novelist and short story writer.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 8, 2021
A strange book from a different time. I loved the prose and the dialogue, they positively sparkle. But it's sometimes hard to understand values that the author seems to assume. Broughton writes movingly about the challenges faced by women, and informatively about the progressive movement. Simultaneously, she seems to really view many women as deeply stupid people who are properly treated like children, and is deeply suspicious of women who don't want to live domestically.
The relationship between Faustina and Altheia is never called romantic, and the word lesbian is never said, but it's hard to imagine how else anyone read this in 1897.
The relationship between Faustina and Altheia is never called romantic, and the word lesbian is never said, but it's hard to imagine how else anyone read this in 1897.
Displaying 1 of 1 review