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A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2025
Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature identifies kept mistresses in British Victorian narrative and offers ways to understand their experiences. The author discusses kept women characters in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Ruth, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and examines the methods their authors use to encourage reader empathy. This book also usefully demonstrates how to identify kept women when they are less visible in texts, including in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Dickens' Hard Times and Dombey and Son, and George Gissing's The Odd Women.
'There is more to the kept woman than the conflicted figure in The Awakening Conscience, and Peel ensures that we see that figure in all of its complexity, and with fresh eyes.'
— Simon Cooke, Victorian Web
Introduction: ‘“I am my own mistress”’: Kept women in Victorian literature
1 Old, particular, fallen, mustachioed, and queer: Other kept women
2 The women who did (and the men who did not)
3 Wives and mistresses in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
4 Marian Evans' story: The kept woman in Daniel Deronda
5 Near mis(tres)ses: Narrative potential v. dead ends
Conclusion: ‘Conventionality is not morality’
References
Index