This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

This course considers ways in which such major authors of the long 19th century as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf go some way to making good the shortcomings of a narrative in which women's voices have been muted and their experience lost. Particular themes include: the matrimonial property law that recognized women only as property; the legalisation of fragile and potentially dangerous female minds and bodies; the withholding of education from women and the consequent lack of employment opportunities for them; and the false consciousness referred to as the doctrine of separate spheres that becomes a metaphor for Gothicized literary fictions of imprisonment and escape. NOTE: Course offering may be cancelled unless a minimum of 20 students enrol.