The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature - by V Sanders (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

About the Author

VALERIE SANDERS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Hull. Previous publications include Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in 19th Century England and Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists. She has also edited Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters and Records of Girlhood: Nineteenth-Century Women's Childhoods.