Maude/on Sisterhoods and a Woman's Thoughts About Women - Softcover

Christina Rossetti; Dinah Mulock Craik

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814774512 ISBN 13: 9780814774519

Publisher: New York Univ Pr, 1994

Synopsis

Showalter's thoughtful, detailed introductory essay is a comprehensive analysis between Rosetti's novella and Craik's essays...the biographical portrait of Christina Rossetti's conflicts makes her a vivid example of the psychological and social barriers to the development of the female poets...her description of Dinah Mulock Craik stressed this woman's common-sense approach to ameliorating the position of the working-class woman in society...useful to students of feminist theory and of Victorian literature.
—Academic Library Book Review

Cristina Rossetti was nineteen years old when she wrote Maude: Prose and Verse in 1850. Clearly autobiographical, the novel examines the heroine's endeavor to resist the notion that modesty, virtue and domesticity constitute the sole duties of womanhood.

For the precocious young poet, the work was only one of several projects of her teens. Growing up in London as the youngest child in a gifted and unusual family of artists and writers, Rossetti had early developed a poetic vocation. But by the time she wrote Maude, the lively, passionate, and adventurous little girl who had hated needlework, delighted in fiercely competitive games of chess, and explored the country with her brothers became a painfully constrained, sickly, and over-scrupulous teenager. Maude makes clear that at least some of Rossetti's affliction came from anxieties about poetic achievement, her wishes both to be admired for her genius and to renounce it as unfeminine. Often overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina struggled to express her own independent authorial voice, and to resist a life bound by the constraints and demands of the traditional female role.

Other late Victorian attitudes towards Anglican women's communities are brought out in On Sisterhoods by Dinah Mulock Craik which appeared in Longman's magazine in 1883. Craik herself worked on the literary border between feminine gentility and feminist rebellion. In 1850, when Christina Rossetti was writing Maude within the confines of her family, Dinah Mulock was supporting herself and her two younger brothers by her pen. On Sisterhoods confronts head-on `the woman question.' Asserting that women's role is to find beauty in their lives through altruism and good works--to be more or less `good women'--Craik provides a radical solution to the `woman question' by advocating the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods, effectively women's co-operatives. For her, the strongest argument for such a sisterhood is the alternative life it offers to single women, with no outlets for their maternal emotions.

The third text presented here, Craik's A Woman's Thoughts About Women, was a widely circulated manual of advice on female self-sufficiency for unmarried women, based on her own experience in a family left destitute by an eccentric father when she was nineteen. It addressed a pressing contemporary problem: the large number of urban single women who were well educated and qualified but for whom traditional employment offered no place. Craik understood that independence would come hard to middle-class women, yet she was optimistic about the ways women might re-educate themselves, abandoning false pride and learning to manage small businesses or conduct trades.

Throughout her career, Craik masked her private feminist views with disdain for women's rights and criticism of women's public activism. Unmarried and self-supporting until the age of forty, she wrote about the problems of single and working women in over fifty popular novels, children's stories and collections of essays.

About this title

Review:

"Tehranian's book covers fresh legal and social territory . . . consistently informative and casts off the cloak of invisibility."
-"Publishers Weekly",

"Tehranian has written a compelling account of discrimination against those of Middle Eastern descent. His book is an important addition to the literature on race in America and could not be more timely."
-Erwin Chemerinsky, Founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine, School of Law

"He provides an important contribution to the dynamic study of the legal and political status of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States."
-"The Law and Politics Book Review",

"A refreshing analysis and accessible account of the contradictory classification of Middle Eastern Americans as whites in the early 1900s and as non-whites a century later."
-Mehdi Bozorgmehr, co-author of "Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond"

"A learned, witty, and analytically biting analysis of race politics and race jurisprudence. A brilliant case that race is understood through performance and is hostage to the politics of fear. Tehranian's legal and intellectual thriller is hard to put down."
-James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University

About the Author:

Elaine Showalter is Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of Sister' Choice: Traditions & Contradictions in American Women's Writing, The Female Malady: Women, Madness & English Culture, Sexual Anarchy: Gender & Culture at the Fin de Siecle, and Modern American Women Writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0814774512
• ISBN 13: 9780814774519
• Binding: Paperback
• Editor: Elaine Showalter