DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Review of Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Authors

Deborah Wynne

Date of this Version

2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 43 (2012)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Dorothea Brooke was reluctant to accept the bequest of her mother's jewellery, but was George Eliot equally resistant to the allure of pretty things? Deborah Wynne thinks not. Wynne cites a letter from Eliot to her friend Elma Stuart in which the energizing pleasure of 'little joys' is a cause for celebration:

it is cheering to think that there are blue clocks as well as troubles in the world. There is another spiritual daughter of mine whom I should gladly see eager about some small delight - a china monster or a silver clasp - instead of telling me that nothing delights her. One can never see the condition of the world truly when one is dead to little joys. (p. 89)

The strategic significance of such small delights is Deborah Wynne's topic in this book. Wynne is not the first to cast an eye on women's relationship with property in this period. Tim Dolin's Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (1997), for example, examines the representation of independently propertied women in Victorian fiction. Wynne's focus, however, is not on the property that women owned but on the property that - before the Married Women's Property Acts in the late nineteenth century - they were not legally entitled to possess: when Millicent Garrett Fawcett's purse was stolen by a pickpocket, the thief was charged with stealing the property of her husband. Wynne emphasizes that when we consider the treatment in Victorian fiction of women's things - linen, china, jewellery, pieces of furniture and items of dress - we need to bear in mind the restrictions upon women's ownership of those things. She wants to draw our attention away from commodity culture and display towards less substantial, everyday objects, such as teacups, handkerchiefs, pincushions, and dolls, and by pursuing the ways in which such things circulate, or cease to circulate, in fictional texts, to demonstrate some of the means by which women evaded or challenged the constraints of property law.