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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.848094209034
EAN: 9780691128351
ISBN: 0691128359
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2007-01-02
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.

Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Interesting and Enlightening
Review: The Victorians were never the prudes our English teachers made them out to be. I will never look at an 1800s fashion plate the same way again.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Revolutionary
Review: This book is an absolutely brilliant, lucid, beautifully written, engrossing exploration of the relationships between women in Victorian England. Marcus' arguments are fresh and deeply surprising -- revolutionary, really -- yet somehow manage to feel utterly inevitable after the fact. I love the breadth of sources -- novels, diaries, fashion magazines, pedagogical manuals, pornography -- Marcus draws upon, and the stunningly diverse modes of relatedness she portrays as available to Victorian women. I rarely find myself reading academic books, yet for me "Between Women" was a real page turner. I recommend it very highly.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Excellent Service
Review: Excellent service, as usual. I am thrilled with the service provided by Amazon and it's vendors and will buy books only from these sources.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: First-rate, riveting, and mind-blowing
Review: Sharon Marcus's "Between Women" is that rare academic book - utterly readable and absorbing and juicy. It not only re-casts Victorian literature in a new light, by examining the roles that women characters have in securing the marriage plot, but ushers the reader into a new way of understanding women's surprising power in Victorian society. The book argues that women and female friendship wielded considerable influence in Victorain society- in novel plots and in the work of marriage reform thinkers and leaders. Her work on "the plot of female amity" has been called ground-breaking and I can see why. Sharon Marcus's pages on "Great Expectations," for example, are just amazing, bringing the reader along, at every step, as this brilliant, clear mind details the charged interactions of Miss Havisham, Estella, and Pip. "Between Women" uses a fascinating array of source materials - not just novels, but pornographic magazines, fashion magazines, and treatises of social reform movements. She points out that sometimes female friendship meant friendship and sometimes it meant lesbian relationships. John Stuart Mill, for example, modeled his marriage reform ideas on the equitable dynamics at play in contemporary lesbian couples. The book's exploration of how mothers and daughters, and daughters with their dolls, were depicted in illustrations, often with sado-masochistic overtones, is pretty unforgettable and quite persuasive. It was fascinating to read how the language of fashion magazines and the language of pornographic journals were often the same. The writing in "Between Women" is wonderful and the research well-organized, diverse, and accessible. It is true that Sharon is a great friend of mine, but please know that it is also true that I would not write these sentences if I did not believe them. I read and adored this book and I hugely recommend it, to academics and non-academics (which I am), alike.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Brilliant and groundbreaking--
Review: --according to the London Review of Books, the London Times, the BBC, and me! Marcus is smart, engaging, thorough-- and makes dazzling use of a vast array of primary sources. She asks (basically), "What if we re-read the Victorians as if women's relationships were important to one another?" Looking through this lens at diaries, letters, conduct manuals, law cases, anthropological writings, fashion plates, doll stories, and pornograpy, Marcus reveals a world that leaps off the page with life and immediacy. Go read it.

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