Bleak houses Book

Surridge has certainly done her research on marital violence--she blends history with literary criticism with analysis of literature of her selected time period of Victorian England. She quotes primary literary and media sources as well as secondary sources and has prompted my interest in much further research in fields she refers to, like bills/laws, without going off topic. She did a good job giving brief summaries of the books that she looks into, but because many of the books she used I hadn't read, it was hard for me to really get into the book. Furthermore, she didn't give as much explanation/discussion of the fin de siecle novels/period she spent two chapters on as I may have needed as well as some major events such as the Whitechapel Murders, so I plan to read a historian's book she sourced--City of Dreadful Delights by Judith Walkowitz. Surridge's argument, however, I really was pleased with because it stated exactly what I was hoping would exist--the prevalence of marital violence in contemporary literature. She not only analyzes the violence instances within each novel she uses but places the novel within the context of history, suggesting that it used influence from the time as well as striking influence in the time with its printing. The books she chooses represent different thematic aspects to marital violence in Victorian literature--but it also extends through decades, beginning extensively with Charles Dickens's various thematic examples and ending with Arthur Conan Doyle's and Mona Caird's novels at the end of the 19th century. This is significant because it follows the development of legal bills throughout the century. Thematically, it sometimes jumps around because she analyzes the wife as pet in many of the novel chapters. I enjoyed this book as a good beginning to understanding the culture and the subject of violence in the period.