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Literary identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga

Educating women : cultural conflict and Victorian literature

In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. By the end of the century, a quiet revolution had occurred; women had penetrated even the venerable walls of Oxford and Cambridge universities and could earn degrees at the many new universities founded during Victoria's reign. During the same period, novelists increasingly put intellectually ambitious heroines - students, teachers, and frustrated scholars - at the centre of their books. This work analyzes the conflict between the higher education movement's emphasis on intellectual achievement and the Victorian novel's continuing dedication to a narrative in which women's success is measured by the achievement of emotional rather than intellectual goals. Focusing on works by Charlotte Bronte, Anna Leon Owens, George Eliot and Thomas Eliot, this work demonstrates that those texts are both shaped by the need to mediate the conflict between the professionalism and publicity increasingly associated with education and the Victorian celebration of women as emblems of domesticity.