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.
Price: £25.00
Pages: 232
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
Publication Date:
23 June 2026
ISBN: 9781526198211
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Women, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Gender studies: women and girls
'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
Katie R. Peel is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
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
