Showalter's thoughtful, detailed introductory essay is a
comprehensive analysis between Rosetti's novella and Craik's
essays...the biographical portrait of Christina Rossetti's
conflicts makes her a vivid example of the psychological and social
barriers to the development of the female poets...her description
of Dinah Mulock Craik stressed this woman's common-sense approach
to ameliorating the position of the working-class woman in
society...useful to students of feminist theory and of Victorian
literature.
--"Academic Library Book Review"
Cristina Rossetti was nineteen years old when she wrote Maude:
Prose and Verse in 1850. Clearly autobiographical, the novel
examines the heroine's endeavor to resist the notion that modesty,
virtue and domesticity constitute the sole duties of womanhood.
For the precocious young poet, the work was only one of several
projects of her teens. Growing up in London as the youngest child
in a gifted and unusual family of artists and writers, Rossetti had
early developed a poetic vocation. But by the time she wrote
"Maude," the lively, passionate, and adventurous little girl who
had hated needlework, delighted in fiercely competitive games of
chess, and explored the country with her brothers became a
painfully constrained, sickly, and over-scrupulous teenager.
"Maude" makes clear that at least some of Rossetti's affliction
came from anxieties about poetic achievement, her wishes both to be
admired for her genius and to renounce it as unfeminine. Often
overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina
struggled to express her own independent authorial voice, and to
resist a life bound by the constraints and demands of the
traditional female role.
Other late Victorian attitudes towards Anglican women's
communities are brought out in "On Sisterhoods" by Dinah Mulock
Craik which appeared in Longman's magazine in 1883. Craik herself
worked on the literary border between feminine gentility and
feminist rebellion. In 1850, when Christina Rossetti was writing
"Maude" within the confines of her family, Dinah Mulock was
supporting herself and her two younger brothers by her pen. "On
Sisterhoods" confronts head-on the woman question.' Asserting that
women's role is to find beauty in their lives through altruism and
good works--to be more or less good women'--Craik provides a
radical solution to the woman question' by advocating the
encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods, effectively women's
co-operatives. For her, the strongest argument for such a
sisterhood is the alternative life it offers to single women, with
no outlets for their maternal emotions.
The third text presented here, Craik's "A Woman's Thoughts About
Women," was a widely circulated manual of advice on female
self-sufficiency for unmarried women, based on her own experience
in a family left destitute by an eccentric father when she was
nineteen. It addressed a pressing contemporary problem: the large
number of urban single women who were well educated and qualified
but for whom traditional employment offered no place. Craik
understood that independence would come hard to middle-class women,
yet she was optimistic about the ways women might re-educate
themselves, abandoning false pride and learning to manage small
businesses or conduct trades.
Throughout her career, Craik masked her private feminist views
with disdain for women's rights and criticism of women's public
activism. Unmarried and self-supporting until the age of forty, she
wrote about the problems of single and working women in over fifty
popular novels, children's stories and collections of essays.
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