Courses

How do people find freedom within restrictive norms and laws? Victorian England, known for its rigid definitions of femininity, nonetheless produced a remarkable number of female outlaws, eccentrics, and activists: spinsters, feminists, working women, cross-dressers, women in “female marriages.”

“Odd Women in Victorian England,” an undergraduate seminar, will explore the pains and pleasures of gender non-conformity through the lens of nineteenth-century literary works, historical documents, and foundational texts in gender and sexuality studies. Readings will include the diaries of Anne Lister, a lesbian libertine; a slander case involving accusations of lesbianism at an all-girls school; the diaries of Hannah Munby, a servant whose upper-class lover fetishized her physical strength; the autobiographies of Annie Besant, socialist and birth-control activist, and Mary Seacole, a nurse who traveled the world; and three major works of Victorian fiction: Aurora Leigh, a narrative poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Villette, a novel by Charlotte Bronte; and Little Dorrit, a novel by Charles Dickens. The course will end with a late 20^th-century historical novel that draws on several of the works we will read in the course: Affinity by Sarah Waters.