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The theme of this paper are the nineteenth century woman authors in the United Kingdom and their writing. A brief overview of the woman writers during the whole century will be given. The most important authors will be represented. The paper will also explore the economic, social, political and other circumstances that determined their writing and try to represent their lives, their struggles, their writing and the styles they used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel letters as sources of learning, this paper studies Bodichon’s correspondence as epistolary articulations of herBildung(self-cultivation). It argues that, conforming toBildung’s idea of forging one’s individuality in interaction with the world, her travelling provided her with a variety of settings through which she extended towards the unknown and incorporated it into her sense of being. In turn, letters functioned as forums where she made sense of encountering the difference through which she individualised her subjectivity. Notwithstanding, a revised reading ofBildungpermits teasing out to what extent Bodichon’s self-cultivation was developed at the expense of certain social categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study combines data from the electronic version of the transcribed census enumerators' books and documentary sources to analyse the entry of women to bookkeeping in late nineteenth century Britain. The paper explores the chronology of the feminisation of bookkeeping and presents a socio-demographic profile and sectoral distribution of women bookkeepers. The study renders more visible the existence of female accounting labour on the boundaries of the private/public divide. It is shown that previous commentators have failed to identify the early sex-typing of bookkeeping in the south of England and in retailing and distribution. The liberal feminist movement and the use of women as cheap or unremunerated labour are offered as explanations for the employment of female accounting functionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their 'otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces' (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long Victorian period has often been interpreted through the lens of 'separate spheres', a notion that compartmentalizes markers such as gender and class into discrete areas. However, the margins surrounding class and gender were full of fissures and scholars have argued for more nuanced research involving specific case studies at a micro-level to uncover the breadth and boundaries of female experience. Adopting this micro-approach by using archives and biographical methods to investigate the communities of women involved in swimming-related careers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields new insights into the complexities of 'separate spheres' ideologies. Serious swimming became acceptable for women of all social classes after facilities expanded following the Baths and Washhouses Acts of 1846 and 1878, and a moral imperative, which required women to be attended to only by women, meant that gender-specific career routes gradually emerged. The class origins and familial connections of female natationists, swimming teachers, and baths employees are explored, to place them within the contemporary social context and to draw some tentative conclusions about the influence of patriarchy on female occupational choices. Reflections on the potential for combining different biographical methods to produce a 'blended approach' are then offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Antoinette Emily Dyce, who was known as Mrs. Danford who discovered the Xiphion danfordiae also known as Iris danfordiae in 1876. Topics discussed include the traditional form of address for a married woman in Victorian times, Dyce's marriage to barrister-at-law Charles G. Danford who made significant contributions to the botanical and horticultural history and Dyce's making of herbarium specimens.

The article discusses lower, or working, class reading culture and readership in Victorian era Great Britain, including what are referred to as penny novel's emotional and sensational aspects. An overview of working class women's reading habits during the Victorian period, including female servants' addiction to novel reading, is provided.

A biography of the 19th century British naturalist Mrs. Margaret Gatty is provided. She was born in Essex, England on June 3, 1809 and married Reverend Alfred Gatty in 1839. Particular focus is given to her study of sea-weeds, including her 1863 book "British Sea-Weeds: Drawn From Professor Harvey’s ‘Phycologia Britannica’ With Descriptions, an Amateur’s Synopsis, Rules for Laying out Sea-Weeds, an Order for Arranging Them in a Herbarium, and an Appendix of New Species." Her relationship with phycologist William Henry Harvey is discussed.

John Stuart Mill's intellectual reputation is unarguable; his liberal credentials seemingly impeccable. Moreover there seems to be a Mill for everyone; liberal, radical, feminist. The precise nature of the feminist Mill has however remained a matter of considerable debate. The purpose of this article is less to engage this speculation, but rather to invite closer consideration of what Mill actually said and wrote about women and the law in nineteenth-century England. For Mill, the law was both an instrument of women's subjection and a prospective means of liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lives of the first women doctors in Britain have been well studied by historians, as have the many debates about the right of women to train and practice as doctors. Yet the relationship between these women and their most obvious comparators and competitors—the newly professionalized hospital nurses—has not been explored. This article makes use of a wide range of sources to explore the ways in which the first lady doctors created "clear water" between themselves and the nurses with whom they worked and trained. In doing so, it reveals an identity that may seem at odds with some of the clichés of Victorian femininity, namely that of the intelligent and ambitious lady doctor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three-volume register of a sworn midwife provides unique insights into midwifery practice in an English city in the second half of the nineteenth century. The register is a rare primary source, and contains 5029 entries, from July 1847 to October 1875. Considered alongside the limited sources discovered to date, this analysis casts light on our understandings of non-elite midwifery, and the wider context of women's work in the nineteenth century. The midwife's patterns of work, her relationships with clients and lying-in charities, and the impact of local economic circumstances on her practice are discussed. Despite her extensive practice, the official record of her occupation is meagre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although in recent years work some academic work has been undertaken about the use of colour, particularly blue, green and yellow, in Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism, little attention has been paid to the significance of the use of white in art, design and literature. Using as its starting point the notion of the Aesthetic or Artistic interior both as designed space and also as the interior self of the Aesthete formed though sensory experience, this article will utilize sources in art, design and literature to explore the complex meanings and symbolism of the colour white in art and design, as well as the relationship between design practice and ideas of artistic and Aesthetic selfhood. I contend that in employing the seemingly blank walls, canvases and draperies of whiteness, artists, writers and designers sought to create surfaces, spaces and images that could, and did, refer to very specific concepts of culture and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the career of Janet Taylor, one of the leading navigation experts of the early Victorian period. The many facets of Taylor’s business activities were enmeshed in the scientific and entrepreneurial pursuits underpinning British global expansion. Taylor, moreover, was an exceptional example of much wider female participation in these maritime activities. As such this constituency of women provides a neglected aspect of Victorian women’s relationship to empire, a phenomenon which has often focused instead upon female engagement in the associational projects of colonial reform. The article considers in particular the paratextual apparatus of Taylor’s publications (such as the title page, dedication, preface and appended advertisements) to consider the ways in which Taylor was able to present herself as a cultural authority in her field. Contrasting Taylor’s public persona with those presented by her male competitors reveals some stark gendered differences however – differences which confound many scholarly arguments concerning the construction of female authorial identities. Unlike her male competitors, who tended to delineate modest personas, stressing their pedagogical experience in the field, Janet Taylor positioned her activities more boldly in relation to their maritime and imperial significance. As such, the article considers the fluid nature of gendered performances in early-Victorian London. In so doing it follows Hall and Rose’s concept of the ‘unconscious acceptance’ of empire in this period, a quiescent sensibility which occasionally became more sharply articulated as a result of contingent – and in this case – highly gendered pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution examines the relationship between women's labor force participation (LFP) and fertility in three industrial towns of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England from a feminist economic perspective. The study augments existing statistical approaches to demographic history by discussing women's motivations. Women's LFP influenced their likelihood of family limitation (via effects on both age at marriage and marital fertility). Where women were most likely to be in paid work, they were most likely to limit family size. It is further argued that the diversity of LFP patterns is the principal explanation for the varied patterns of fertility decline in different parts of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that supplements are indispensable to Victorian periodical research, for together with their parent periodicals, they function to construct specific cultural values. The authors' case study of the Treasury of Literature (1868–75), literary supplement to the Ladies' Treasury (1857–1895), examines how this addendum enabled the Ladies' Treasury to negotiate the tensions between the restrictive social and domestic roles prescribed to Victorian middle-class women on the one hand, and women's own varied everyday experience on the other. Conceived just as the contemporary women's movement was beginning to gain strength, its scientific and informative content, reminiscent of the ‘enlightened’ women's journals of the late eighteenth century, provided a perfect counterpart to the more traditional values of domesticity which predominated in the main magazine. As such, it provides further insights into the unstable construction of femininities during this critical period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores domestic practices of hydropathy in Britain, suggesting that these formed a major contribution to the popularity of the system in the mid-nineteenth century. Domestic hydropathy was encouraged by hydropathic practitioners in their manuals and in the training they provided at their establishments. We argue that hydropathy can be seen as belonging to two interacting spheres, the hydro and the home, and was associated with a mission to encourage self-healing practices as well as commercial interests. Home treatments were advocated as a follow-up to attendance at hydros and encouraged as a low-cost option for those unable to afford such visits. Domestic hydropathy emphasized the high profile of the patient and was depicted as being especially appropriate for women, though in many households it appears to have been a common concern between husbands and wives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]