The article examines The Good Wife (CBS 2009–), as well as other recent television series with female professionals as protagonists, alongside nineteenth-century novels such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Law and the Lady, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, or Bram Stoker's Dracula, which, like The Good Wife, place ‘the law’ and ‘the lady’ in direct confrontation. This comparative analysis reveals that current television series, even those that showcase women's professional success, articulate a discourse that valorises domestic stability and motherhood above professional achievements and, therefore, resonate with Victorian ideologies about the conflicted relation between women and the public sphere. Contemporary television series are not so different from Victorian texts that grant their heroines freedom to move outside home-boundaries, while treating women's public ascendancy as a transgression of normative femininity and using a number of strategies devised to guarantee women's return home and/or an appreciation of what they have to sacrifice in order to advance in their careers.
