Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (Women of Letters)

by Dorothy Mermin (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $4.20

  Victorian England saw the first great flowering of women's writing in English. During this era the works of many women - the Bront's, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Harriet Martineau, and others - first entered the mainstream of English literature. In Godiva's Ride , Dorothy Mermin describes how women were encouraged to become writers, how they were discouraged and hindered, and what they wrote - novels, poetry, and nonfiction prose. Beginning with the childhood and adolescence of Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bront', and Eliot, ambitious young women who sought to enter the male-dominated literary tradition, Mermin examines their families, the books they read, their education, and religious and cultural values that shaped their careers.