Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empire [Hardcover]

Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel: Space, Gender, and Empireinvestigates the ways domesticity shapes and threatens female characters in British fiction from the 1750s to the 1850s. Going far beyond the well-trod ground of the marriage plot, women writers in this period explored complicated issues such as sexual abuse, grief, and the way coverture and inheritance laws challenged womens survival. The author argues that women writers used the novel as a space where they could confront anxieties about the precarity of domesticity and the implicit threat of homelessness many women of the middle ranks faced. Precarious Domesticity explores the way female characters subvert these dynamics by reordering domestic space to enact ingenious and creative resistances to their marginalization in Jane Collier, Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Bront?. The author also explores the implications of British imperialisms impact on domestic ideology, both in the consumer products imported into England and the wealth derived from plantation slavery and global trade made possible by enslaved labor.This book investigates the ways domesticity threatens female characters in British fiction from the 1750s to the 1850s. The author argues that fiction provides an imaginative space where these characters can enact resistances to marginalization while also considering how they participate in British imperialism.Henna Messinais assistant professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University.In an incisive analysis of how displacement and dispossession lie at the heart of domestic fiction, Henna Messina examines novels by Burney, Austen, Bront?, and Gaskell, drawing attention to the moment when the heroine is expelled from the comfort of a family home. Domestic space then becomes precarious for these homeless and dependent young women as they enter into the domiciles of women, who, though entrusted with their care, proceed to tormel#�