Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck

Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls “literary housekeeping.” The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to “set the human household in order.”

To Mary Augusta Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, housekeeping represented public making the food supply safe, reforming politics, and improving the human race itself. Raising the Dust places their writing in the context of the late-Victorian era, in particular the eugenics movement, the proliferation of household conveniences, the home economics movement, and decreased reliance on servants. These changes affected relationships between the domestic sphere and the public sphere, and hence shaped the portrayal of domesticity in the era's fiction and nonfiction.

Moreover, Ward, Grand, and Gilman articulated a domestic aesthetic that swept away boundaries. Sutton-Ramspeck uncovers a new paradigm literature as engaging the public realm through the devices and perspectives of the domestic. Her innovative and ambitious book also connects fixations on cleaning with the discovery of germs (the first bacterium discovered was anthrax, and knowledge of its properties increased fears of dust); analyzes advertising cards for soap; and links the mental illness in Gilman's “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to fears during the period of arsenic poisoning from wallpaper.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2004

About the author

Beth Sutton-Ramspeck is a retired English professor, a Victorianist by training and a Potterhead through reading, teaching, research, and writing. Educated at Kenyon College, the University of California at Irvine, and Indiana University, she has taught at Southwest Texas State University (now called Texas State University), Virginia Tech, Millikin University, and The Ohio State University, where she was tenured and taught for 22 years.

While teaching at Virginia Tech, she happened on the novel Helbeck of Bannisdale, by Mary Ward (who published as "Mrs. Humphry Ward"). It changed her life, She fell head over heels in love with the novel, read more Ward books, and decided to return to graduate school (Indiana U), where she wrote her dissertation about Ward. Her tenure book at Ohio State branched out from Ward to include two contemporaries whose feminist credentials were more overt. That book was Raising the Dust.

After tenure, writing criticism seemed too painful, though she did continue editing books by Ward, because she wanted others to find the same pleasures she had. Then Sutton-Ramspeck was asked to teach a class in the Harry Potter books, started writing conference papers, and rediscovered her interest in lit. crit., also around the same time she became active in Democratic politics. Her interests cohered after the 2016 election, leading her to focus her Harry Potter book's thesis on rule-breaking as a form of resistance.