A Gendered Experience

Chapter 4 examines confession in the first half of the nineteenth century through the lens of gender. As men often served in the military or held government positions, they were more likely to be suspected of conspiracies or treason and to experience confession as a means of discipline and surveillance. As a result, their depictions of confession showed its external, social, and political side. By contrast, women came to approach confession as an autobiographical narrative and a form of private literary production, seeking closer relationships with their father-confessors. Sacramental confession became part of a textual process of Russian women’s reading, devotion, and life-writing. Both in women’s going to confession in larger numbers and in their desire for a more meaningful confession, confession became an increasingly feminine phenomenon.

Scrapbooks and Women’s Reading Practices

In this chapter, my focus shifts from women’s roles as writers to their roles as readers and consumers of the cheap weekly press, 1820–60. I first examine scrapbooks held by John Rylands Library and the Harry Page Collection at Manchester Metropolitan University, which have much to tell us about how middle-class women read: their processes of selecting, copying, arranging, and editing printed scraps in creative ways. I first explore some of the challenges that arise when reading women’s scrapbooks and then demonstrate methodologies that help us begin to unpack their meanings, especially their relationship to the cheap popular press, which served both as a creative inspiration and a source of content. In the next section, I examine a type of content that was particularly ubiquitous in scrapbooks: poetry. The frequent appearance of verse in women’s albums corresponded with the proliferation of poetry in miscellaneous columns and other popular publication formats during the early and mid-Victorian periods. Finally, I examine a remarkable scrapbook from the 1850s that provides an enticing view of the broad range of periodicals and books middle-class women read—and how they used these disparate materials to imbue their leisure time with meaning.

Women and books in the seventeenth century

A summary account of women’s book ownership patterns during the seventeenth century. Although much work is now ongoing to understand the extent of female book ownership and reading in the early modern period, the documentary record is unbalanced. This chapter brings together many kinds of evidence—contemporary lists, inscriptions, bookplates, bindings, inscriptions, wills—to provide an overview of women’s book ownership during the seventeenth century. Women interfacing with books was widespread, not restricted to the closets of gentry ladies, and cultural historians keen to see women’s reading as controversial or subversive are overstating the case. Subject coverage of women’s libraries is explored, noting the high proportion of devotional and English language material typically found, alongside a wider range of books which may be also be associated with women.

Gothic Infections

This article proposes, a reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) as a case study for discussing infectious literature, storytelling as therapy and the interconnectedness of Gothic methodologies and medical humanities. Northanger Abbey was written in a period when women’s reading habits was a contested topic, so I will provide a quick historical overview of the period and the problematic Gothic novel, which Northanger Abbey satirizes. Where previous research has focused on Catherine Morland, the protagonist and ‘misreader’ in this Gothic satire, this article will focus on Austen’s feminized hero, Henry Tilney, and read him in the role of a mesmeric healer. His goal is to cure Catherine of her obsession with Gothic novels, in order for her to fulfil the feminine ideal of the time. The mesmeric method is to produce a crisis in the patient, however, I will show how Henry’s plan fails and he inadvertently produces a crisis in himself, and forces him to realize the extent of his own ‘reading illness’. He is ‘infected’ by the masculine literary canon, which in his mind entails literary superiority over Catherine and his sister Eleanor. Storytelling as therapy is a term that connects literature and trauma into a method of organizing experience. My analysis will focus on a selection of dialogue between the main characters and Henry’s monologues, to highlight where Austen’s hero is compelled to take narrative control as a way to control his own trauma; his troubled relationship with his father and the death of his mother.