Victorian Heroines

by Kimberley Reynolds

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of Victorian constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, Victorian Heroines offers a new look at the representation of women and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature and painting. Arguing against the conventional dyadic model that interprets Victorian fiction in terms of a rigid distinction between the good and bad, the sexual and asexual woman, the authors suggest a more complex paradigm, simultaneously concealing and revealing contradictory attitudes to Victorian womanhood. The b