Download or read book Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel written by Monica F. Cohen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-02-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Bront , Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade. Cohen traces ways in which domestic work, often perceived as the most feminine of all activities, gained social credibility through being described in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism. She shows how women sought identity and privilege within Victorian culture, and revises our understanding of nineteenth-century domestic ideology.