Exploding the lie : 'angelic womanhood' in selected works by Harriet Martineau, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot

Abstract

Each of these novelists, in her own way, presents a critique of the idealised woman of the nineteenth-century. My aim in this dissertation is to reveal the degree to which each is successful in her mission to 'explode the lie' of angelic womanhood, and, in so doing, free her long-incarcerated Victorian sisters. It took great courage and fortitude to utter at times a lone dissenting voice; and female writers of the present owe a great debt of gratitude to their pioneering Victorian counterparts, who cleared the way for them to take up the banner and continue the march towards female liberation from a stifling ideology.