Jessica Cox

Gender, Conflict, Continuity: Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893)

Abstract The New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle brought into conflict patriarchal and feminist ideologies, challenging widely held assumptions about gender roles and the position of women. Sarah Grands The Heavenly Twins is an important contribution to the genre, and engages with a number of the key issues that concerned feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, including marriage, the education of women, the double standard, male licentiousness, and the wider issue of social purity. These are also key themes in Anne Brontës The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — published nearly fifty years before Grands seminal New Woman text. In this essay, I consider Anne Brontës text as a forerunner to the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle, through a comparative examination of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Heavenly Twins.

A touch of in'nard fever: Illness and moral decline in 'Elster's Folly'

The important relationship between illness and morality in the fiction of Mrs Henry Wood looms large in her 1866 novel Elsters Folly. This article argues that Woods apparently conservative sensationalism, suggested by the presence of a moralizing narrator in many of her works, as well as by the conclusions to her novels, in which order is almost inevitably restored, in fact conceals a more subversive element in her fiction. In Elsters Folly, transgression, and specifically sexual transgression, is figured as contagious (a common ploy in Victorian fiction), and a superficial reading would seem to reinforce the notion of Wood as a conservative sensation writer: a number of characters whose morality is in question fall ill and die, while moral health is clearly linked to physical health through Woods portrayal of the Countess Dowager, an immoral woman who suffers from an obsessive phobia of illness. However, the conclusion of the novel undermines this reading: the illegitimate daughter, unlike the illegitimate son, is not only permitted to live, but also retains the title to which she is not, in fact, legally entitled. In this way, Wood subtly undermines conventional Victorian morality through her representation of sin, illness and the family.

From Page to Screen: Transforming M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret

This paper compares Mary Elizabeth Braddons 1862 novel, Lady Audleys Secret, with Donald Hounams 2000 TV adaptation of the text. Braddons novel is a key example of the sensation literature of the 1860s, characterised by the subversion of notions of Victorian domesticity and femininity. Although not overtly feminist, the novel nevertheless raises important questions about the social situation of the nineteenth-century woman, especially through its concerns with marriage and female insanity. In particular, this essay focuses on the translation of the feminist message from the novel to the screen, and considers the implications of the status of the Victorian woman writer and twentieth-century male scriptwriter on their respective versions of the text. Specific consideration is given to the conclusion of the film adaptation, which is radically different from that of the original narrative. The conclusion of the paper examines the overall effectiveness of Hounams film adaptation of a Victorian narrative.