Book Description

This book opens the curtain on the crucial role played by Victorian and Edwardian novelists in changing views of domestic violence. Examining the mechanisms of domestic violence through the historical lenses of the law, crime, and economics, this study illuminates these novelists’ depictions of wife-battering, including scenes in which women witness their children being beaten or children witness their mothers’ beatings. This book also shows how these representations interacted with changing paradigms of masculinity and femininity at the time. Extending from the decades before the 1857 Divorce Act to the Suffrage era, the book details the changing circumstances of conjugal violence and divorce in England. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. (1844) and Caroline Norton’s Stuart of Dunleath: A Story of Modern Times (1851) expose the impact of class on reactions to domestic violence. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) and Ouida’s (Marie Louise de la Ramé) Moths (1880) depict proto-New Women figures who resist domestic violence, while traditional wife figures continue to fall victim. In Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” (1904), protagonists exact their own justice on perpetrators of domestic violence. By the Edwardian period, it was clear that legislation alone could not solve the problems of domestic violence. Constance Maud’s No Surrender (1911) adroitly links wife-battering with public violence against suffragettes, exposing the underlying British socio-cultural system that maintained women’s subordination.