The Language of Gender and Class challenges widely-held assumptions about the study of the Victorian novel. The author analyzes language as the framework for the concepts of gender and the formations of social class, specifically, how stereotypes of gender and class encode cultural myths that reinforce the status quo.

Re-examining six major Victorian novels: Shirley by Charlotte Bronte; North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell; Felix Holt by George Eliot; Hard Times by Charles Dickens; The Unclassed by George Gissing; and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Patricia Ingham demonstrates that none of the writers, male or female, easily accept stereotypes of gender and class. The classic figures of Angel and Whore are reassessed and modified. And the result, argues Ingham, is that new representations of femininity can begin to emerge.