Reader, I married him: A study of the women characters of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot

The first chapter describes such circumstances in the lives of the novelists themselves as would be likely to influence their attitudes to the Woman Question, as it was beginning to be classed: their homes, their temperaments, their education, their careers as writers. The next four chapters largely abandon the biographical approach and concentrate critically on the novels as novels and in particular on the way in which the authors present not only their heroines but also their minor women characters. They portray a wide range of feminine experience, which is significant partly as social information and comment but more importantly as an integral element in the novelists' tone and methods. At a time when the cause of female emancipation was being increasingly discussed in real life, women writers, and these four especially, were far from single-minded about it, and the resultant ambiguities in their work are of great artistic moment.