Readers and mistresses: Kept women in Victorian literature (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century)

Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and examines the methods their authors use to encourage reader empathy. This book also usefully demonstrates how to identify kept women when they are less visible in texts, including in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’ Hard Times and Dombey and Son, and George Gissing’s The Odd Women.