Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate or aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century.
Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage."

Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to the First World War. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.

Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied nor limited to marriage. Legal rights frequently clashed with other family claims, and the reallocation of wealth affected far more than spouses or the marital state. Competition between wives and children is just one of many ways in which Victorian fiction suggests the perceived benefits and threats of property reform. In nineteenth-century fiction, portrayals of women's claims to ownership provide insight into the social networks forged through property transactions and also offer a lens to examine a wide range of other social matters, including testamentary practices, wills, and copyright law; economic and evolutionary models of mutuality; the twin dangers of greed and generosity; inheritance and custody rights; the economic ramifications of loyalty and family obligation; and the legacy of nineteenth-century economic practices for women today. Understanding the reform of married women's property as both an ideologically and materially substantial redistribution of the nation's wealth as well as one complicated by competing cultural traditions, this book explores the widespread ways in which women's financial agency was imagined by fiction that engages with but also diverges from the law in accounts of economic choices and transactions. Repeatedly, narratives by Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant suggest both that the law is inadequate to account for the way that property enables and disrupts relationships, and that the form of the Victorian novel - in its ability to track intimate and intricate exchanges across generations - is better suited to such tasks.