{"product_id":"bleak-houses-marital-violence-in-victorian-fiction-9780821416433","title":"Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat \"private\" family violence? \u003ci\u003eBleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads \u003ci\u003eDombey and Son\u003c\/i\u003e and Anne Brontë's \u003ci\u003eThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall\u003c\/i\u003e in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's \u003ci\u003eJanet's Repentance\u003c\/i\u003e in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's \u003ci\u003eThe Woman in White\u003c\/i\u003e and Anthony Trollope's \u003ci\u003eHe Knew He Was Right.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the \u003ci\u003eDaily Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. \u003ci\u003eBleak Houses\u003c\/i\u003e thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLisa Surridge\u003c\/b\u003e is Professor of English and Associate Dean Academic of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria. She is author of \u003ci\u003eBleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction.\u003c\/i\u003e With Mary Elizabeth Leighton, she coedited the \u003ci\u003eBroadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, 1832-1901\u003c\/i\u003e and was coeditor of the \u003ci\u003eVictorian Review.\u003c\/i\u003e Her articles and book chapters appear in \u003ci\u003eVictorian Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Literature and Culture, \u003c\/i\u003e the \u003ci\u003eOxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, \u003c\/i\u003e and elsewhere.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Ohio University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50845619159314,"sku":"9780821416433","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_1b482ab7-1036-43ec-82ff-744fed0782b3.jpg?v=1737354474","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/bleak-houses-marital-violence-in-victorian-fiction-9780821416433","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}