Flirtation And Courtship In Nineteenth Century British Culture

This is volume one of a three-volume set that brings together a rich collection of primary source materials on flirtation and courtship in the nineteenth-century. Introductory essays and extensive editorial apparatus offer historical and cultural contexts of the materials included Throughout the long nineteenth-century, a woman's life was commonly thought to fall into three discrete developmental stages; personal formation and a gendered education; a young woman's entrance onto the marriage market; and finally her emergence at the apogee of normative femininity as wife and mother. In all three stages of development, there was an unspoken awareness of the duplicity at the heart of this carefully cultivated femininity. What women were taught, no matter their age, was that if you desired anything in life, it behooved you to perform indifference. This meant that for women, the art of flirtation and feigning indifference were viewed as essential survival skills that could guarantee success in life. These three volumes document the many ways in which nineteenth-century women were educated in this seemingly universal wisdom, but just as frequently managed to manipulate, subvert, and navigate their way through such proscribed norms to achieve their own desires. Presenting a wide range of documents from novels, memoirs, literary journals, newspapers, plays, poetry, songs, parlour games, and legal documents, this collection will illuminate a far more diverse set of options available to women in their quest for happiness, and a new understanding of the operations of courtship and flirtation, the central concerns of a nineteenth-century woman's life. The volumes will be of interest to scholars of history, literature, gender and cultural studies, with an interest in the nineteenth-century.

This is volume two of a three-volume set that brings together a rich collection of primary source materials on flirtation and courtship in the nineteenth-century. Introductory essays and extensive editorial apparatus offer historical and cultural contexts of the materials included Throughout the long nineteenth-century, a woman’s life was commonly thought to fall into three discrete developmental stages; personal formation and a gendered education; a young woman’s entrance onto the marriage market; and finally her emergence at the apogee of normative femininity as wife and mother. In all three stages of development, there was an unspoken awareness of the duplicity at the heart of this carefully cultivated femininity. What women were taught, no matter their age, was that if you desired anything in life, it behooved you to perform indifference. This meant that for women, the art of flirtation and feigning indifference were viewed as essential survival skills that could guarantee success in life. These three volumes document the many ways in which nineteenth-century women were educated in this seemingly universal wisdom, but just as frequently managed to manipulate, subvert, and navigate their way through such proscribed norms to achieve their own desires. Presenting a wide range of documents from novels, memoirs, literary journals, newspapers, plays, poetry, songs, parlour games, and legal documents, this collection will illuminate a far more diverse set of options available to women in their quest for happiness, and a new understanding of the operations of courtship and flirtation, the "central" concerns of a nineteenth-century woman’s life. The volumes will be of interest to scholars of history, literature, gender and cultural studies, with an interest in the nineteenth-century.

This book examines the popular publications of the Victorian period, illuminating the intricacies of courtship and marriage from the differing perspectives of the working, middle, and upper classes. In contemporary culture, the near obsessive pursuit of love and monogamous bliss is considered "normal," as evidenced by a wide range of online dating sites, television shows such as Sex in the City and The Bachelorette, and an endless stream of Hollywood romantic comedies. Ironically, when it comes to love and marriage, we still wrestle with many of the same emotional and social challenges as our 19th-century predecessors did over 100 years ago. Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England draws on little-known conduct books, letter-writing manuals, domestic guidebooks, periodical articles, letters, and novels to reveal what the period equivalents of "dating" and "tying the knot" were like in the Victorian era. By addressing topics such as the etiquette of introductions and home visits, the roles of parents and chaperones, the events of the London season, model love letters, and the specific challenges facing domestic servants seeking spouses, author Jennifer Phegley provides a fascinating examination of British courtship and marriage rituals among the working, middle, and upper classes from the 1830s to the 1910s.

"Employs transimperial reading, queer theory, disability studies, and philosophies of the formation of human society to scrutinize nineteenth-century marriage--grappling with questions of women's relation to education, careers, science, and crime and aiming to widen the repertoire of critical questions asked about how fiction represents conjugal coupling"--

Deeply informed and appealingly written, this revised and updated second edition gives fresh life to the enthralling sexual, poetic and political contradictions that make Byron the first literary celebrity. An authoritative source for students, this companion also points to emerging new areas of research.

COURTSHIP, CLASS AND GENDER IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND.

Top scholars in Victorian studies reexamine questions about marriage and the marriage plot from cutting-edge perspectives.

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.