A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2025
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 Gaskells Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Brontës The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliots 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.