Reviews for Children, parents, and the rise of the novel

The average rating for Children, parents, and the rise of the novel based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-07 00:00:00 Timothy Shearer This is a book that maybe 1% of my friends here might be interested in, but I am here to say that it was excellent. Surridge's historical and literary knowledge is vast and she does an exceptional job of linking fictional works to the real world events and trends that influenced their creation. I learned a great deal about Victorian perceptions towards "marital cruelty" and how these views evolved and contradicted over time. I'm glad that I had previously read a number of the novels/stories featured here in my teenage bout of Victorian Insanity, because I can imagine the book being much less impactful without background knowledge of the fiction involved. It was a treat to see Dickens get a good old fashioned dressing down for his misogyny (goodness knows he deserves it!) and of course I got incredibly emotional reading the chapters about works by Anne Bronte and Mona Caird. Both were ground-breaking feminist writers who defied proscription, prejudice and custom to write genuinely radical texts advocating for female autonomy and dignity in a time and place where a woman was not even considered her own person under the law once she was married. While reading this book it got very overwhelming to think about the amount of female suffering that was not even implicitly but entirely explicitly condoned in the Victorian era, but I also appreciated that Surridge drew parallels to the modern world- especially noting the horrific fact that marital rape was not considered a crime until well into the 20th century. We are very much still grappling with the legacy of backward, dismissive and ineffective ways of dealing with intimate partner violence.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-23 00:00:00 William Monk 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.