Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction

by Judith Rowbotham

Judith Rowbotham bases Good Girls Make Good Wives on her own wide reading of late Victorian novels for girls, from which she has culled representative examples of fictionalized instruction on several topics: religion, education, history, British imperialism, and women's careers. From this material she provides a meticulously executed descriptive catalog of dominant messages and thematic patterns. Her governing assertion is that novels marketed for young women underwent a subtle change during the period from 1840 to 1905: increasingly, the otherworldly, somewhat static "Household Fairy" was replaced with a more action-oriented, socially aware "Home Goddess."

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989