Portrait of a Lady: Victorian Women's Novels and the Construction of Female Subjectivity

This project combines literary analysis with cultural history to provide a new perspective on the development of the 19th century novel and modern notions of subjectivity. By re-orienting Greenblatt's influential concept of self-fashioning to include women's experience, it will show that a particular set of circumstances converge in Victorian England to produce a wholly new set of possibilities for female self-representation. It will examine women novelists' contribution to the modern idea of self against the historical context in which both scientific advances and material conditions led to an obsession with representing the self, and contemporary debates crucially informed conceptions of female autonomy and identity.