There are many ‘gaps’ or ‘silences’1 in women’s history – especially in relation to their interior lives. Historians seeking to penetrate the thoughts and emotions of ‘ordinary’ single middle-class women living during the Late Victorian and Edwardian years have a challenging task. These women rarely left personal documents for historians to analyse. Novels, particularly popular or bestselling novels, represent one pathway into this realm. Popular novels are numbered among the few written sources that are available to help historians to fill in some of the absences in the conventional historical record. I have chosen a selection of the novels of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) and Marie Corelli (1855-1924) to provide insights into the attitudes of, and attitudes towards, unmarried middle-class women at the turn of the twentieth century. The works of both Bennett and Corelli are invaluable sources because each author achieved a substantial level of ongoing commercial success. Their novels are vitally important to historians of mentalite because they focus on recurring themes and issues and consistently support certain views and values. Bearing in mind the extensive readership that Bennett and Corelli each enjoyed, historians can legitimately assume that these authors’ ideas and values corresponded with many of the emotional concerns and standards of their audience, and resonated in the minds of their readers, as well as simultaneously entering into the wider contemporary debate. An enormous body of literature concerning the lives of women during the Victorian and Edwardian eras has been published over the past two or three decades. A large volume of this historical research has concentrated on detailing the social, moral and economic context in which these women operated. A significantly smaller portion of it has dedicated itself to probing the interior lives of women, mostly upper middleand upper-class women, by using personal documents, such as diaries and letters. This thesis builds on the former, while hoping to complement the latter. It does not aim to supplant or replace previous research into women’s history. Rather, it intends to add to it by exploring the emotions and the experiences of women from the middle classes – women whose feelings and thoughts are, for the most part, undocumented. This study explores the implications of using popular novels as an alternative and an additional source for historians attempting to reconstruct the thoughts, feelings and experiences with which unmarried middle-class women were familiar – what Bernard Bailyn terms their ‘personal map of reality’.2 It does so by examining characterisation, plots and outcomes, recurring themes and issues, and implicit allusions – those noticeable gaps or absences in the fictional narrative. Thus, it analyses the attitudes and emotions of ordinary women, while also testing the extent to which popular novels are useful to historians of mentalite. Moreover, using a comparative approach to examine Bennett’s solidly popular middlebrow books and Corelli’s phenomenally popular or bestselling novels for their historical insights, this thesis further points to the differences in perspective between literature boasting varying degrees of popularity. It asks the question: which is more valuable to historians – middlebrow or bestselling fiction? Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law This thesis is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1593 Publication Details Sharon Crozier–De Rosa, A Novel Approach to History: Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli and the Interior Lives of Single Middle-Class Women, England, 1880-1914, PhD. thesis, Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Flinders University, November 2003, 390p. This thesis is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1593 1 A Novel Approach to History: Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli and the Interior Lives of Single Middle-Class Women, England, 1880-1914 Sharon Crozier–De Rosa B. A. Hons. (History) A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History Faculty of Social Sciences Flinders University

/pdf/a-novel-approach-to-history-arnold-bennett-marie-corelli-and-3fh8egrh4h.pdf

A Novel Approach to History: Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli and the Interior Lives of Single Middle-Class Women, England, 1880-1914

Social order and women's roles in the utopian novels of edward bellamy, h.g. wells, and charlotte perkins gilman

On the shelf : women writers, publishing and philanthropy in mid-nineteenth-century England

The thesis examines the position of nurses during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899 ? 1902) and considers how their work helped to raise the profile of nursing. The experience of the war demonstrated the superiority of the work undertaken by trained nurses as compared with that of ?amateurs?. At the commencement of war a small cohort of army nurses worked alongside large numbers of trained male orderlies, however these numbers proved insufficient during the period of the war and additional, entirely untrained orderlies (often convalescent soldiers) were relied upon to deliver nursing care. Against a backdrop of long term antipathy toward nurses at the seat of war, the work of both army and civilian nurses in military hospitals suggested that the clinical proficiency of trained nurses had a significant impact on military effectiveness. The thesis will develop arguments based on the personal testimonies of nurses who served during the Anglo-Boer War, relating to clinical nursing and nurses perceptions of professionalism during the period. Personal testimony will be used primarily to examine the working lives and experiences of serving nurses, as many historians simply state that the excellent work of the nurses forced changes, yet make no allusion to what this specifically entailed. Faced with the exigencies of war, including limited medical supplies and military bureaucracy (termed by nurses and doctors alike as ?red tape?) that hindered nurses? abilities to provide high levels of care, nurses demonstrated their developing clinical confidence. Despite accusations that nurses were ?frivolling? in South Africa, raising concerns over the control and organisation of nurses in future military campaigns, the social exploits of nurses on active service was not entirely detrimental to contemporary views of their professional status. Nurses were able to demonstrate their abilities to survive the hardships of war, including nursing close to the ?front lines? of war and the arduous conditions inherent in living under canvas on the South African veldt. Not only were nurses proving their abilities to endure hardship normally associated with masculine work, but they were also establishing their clinical capabilities. This was especially so during the serious typhoid epidemics when nurses were able to draw upon their expert knowledge to provide careful nursing care based on extensive experience. Nurses, who had undergone recognised training in Britain, demonstrated their professional competence and proved that nursing was a learned skill, not merely an innate womanly trait. The war also represented an opportunity to evidence their fitness for citizenship by using their skilled training for the benefit of the Empire. The subsequent reform of the Army Nursing Service, resulting in the establishment of the Queen Alexandra?s Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1902, suggests permanent recognition of the essential role of nurses in times of both war and peace.

Raising professional confidence: The influence of the Anglo-Boer War (1899 - 1902) on the development and recognition of nursing as a profession

To the western visitor around the turn of the century, Korean women seemed the most secluded on earth. Isabella Bishop, the adventurous English traveler who visited Korea in the last years of the nineteenth century, reported that women there experienced a unique confinement: from the closing of the city gates of Seoul at dusk, all men except for the blind and officials were banished from the streets; then, and only then, in the safety of a male-free darkness, were the women at liberty to stroll and make social calls. And the higher the woman’s status, the more severe her seclusion. The queen herself conceded that she knew little of her country, having never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight. This deprivation stemmed from the peculiar practice of rigidly segregating and secluding girls when they reached the age of six (Allen 1908; Bishop 1898; Glunicke 1904; Jones 1896). The custom was observed so faithfully that Bishop, during her extensive Korean travels, never saw a girl who looked above six. The traditional Korean society therefore lacked the “brightness which girl life contributes to social existence” (Bishop 1898: 342).

Jihang Park

Papers

Women of Their Time: The Growing Recognition of the Second Sex in Victorian and Edwardian England