At book events, I’m often asked, How realistic is it that in your novels you have women heroines being pianists and artists and writers? How much agency and autonomy did a woman really have in 1870s England? Could she really study art at the Slade School? Make a living by her pen? Run around in the streets in male garb? Choose her spouse?
These are great questions. Sometimes people follow them up with, “In Bridgerton …” or “In Jane Austen’s books …”
One thing I should clarify is that while Jane Austen had a brilliantly modern sensibility, she was writing in the 1810s, many decades before the 1870s—and Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels are similarly set in the Regency period, before Queen Victorian even came to the throne in 1837.
The other thing to remember is that even in books written during the 1870s by authors such as Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Anthony Trollope, we’re seeing women as they are depicted in fiction. Just as a painted portrait can show you traits the painter wants you to see, fiction reflects what the writer chooses to show. Arguably, depicting women as frail, nervous, and fainting upon couches (such as they are pictured, above) was a Victorian strategy of representation that suggests how anxious many real Victorians felt as women began to gain more autonomy in the world outside the home, and more control over their finances, children, and bodies, as the century progressed.
In writing my books, one of my challenges is to attend to the strict social mores of the Victorian era (1837-1901) because no matter how “spunky” a heroine, the role of women, particularly of the upper classes, was fairly well constrained in this patriarchal society. A young, single, middle-class Victorian woman was subject to her father’s judgment. Once she was married, she was subject to her husband, under the legal doctrine of coverture.
Here is a version of the legal definition of coverture, from the legal scholar William Blackstone:
“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”
In practical terms, this meant that a woman’s property belonged to her husband. The children also belonged to the husband. A married woman could not inherit money or property, or represent herself in court, or initiate divorce unless she could prove both that the husband had been unfaithful and had physically abused her or deserted her for more than four years.
Now, after a lot of social agitation in the 1860s—helped in part by the growing number of newspapers and rising literacy rates—circumstances for women and girls were changing. During the 1870s, a cluster of laws were passed that profoundly reshaped the situation of women and girls, which is one reason I find the 1870s the most interesting decade in Queen Victoria’s long reign. For example, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, allowed working women who earned a wage to keep it rather than handing it over to their husbands, for the first time. The Education Act of 1870 was the first step in mandating that all children—both boys and girls—receive schooling until age 12. The Factory Act (Health of Women &c) of 1874 limited the hours of women who toiled in factories to 56 hours per week. Another law protected infants born out of wedlock—and that’s just the beginning.
One of the places women were finding what I call “wiggle room” for themselves, places where they might find some autonomy, some power to direct their own lives, was in the professional arts. In A Dangerous Duet, my heroine Nell Hallam, a gifted pianist, is based upon several different Victorian women pianists, all of whom were extraordinarily gifted and helped to shape both music and the art of performance. One was Charles Dickens’s older sister Fanny, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, under one of Beethoven’s former students. Others were Marie Pleyel, a Belgian concert pianist; the German musician and composer Clara Schumann; and the English pianist Arabella Goddard, who was one of the first to memorize her pieces and perform without her printed music. In A Trace of Deceit, I leaned on the stories of Victorian women artists Kate Greenaway and Evelyn de Morgan, both of whom studied at the Slade School of Art in London.
In Down a Dark River, Inspector Corravan’s love interest Belinda Gale is a novelist. Sometimes she writes under a nom-de-plume; other times she writes under her own name. She is one in a long line of women novelists beginning with Aphra Behn, who wrote Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave in 1688. (Many say that Daniel Defoe was the first English novelist, with Robinson Crusoe in 1719; I disagree.) Other women novelists in the English literary tradition include Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Fanny Trollope, George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans), and Mrs. Henry Wood.
Women were also active in other areas, including social policy. One woman I’ve always found particularly interesting is Annie Besant (1847-1933, pictured above). (Her presence at Belinda’s evening soirees causes the burglary that brings Corravan and Belinda together in my book.) Besant was notorious because she and her friend Charles Bradlaugh published a book on birth control in 1877. (Gasp.) Together Bradlaugh and Besant formed the Free Thought Publishing Company in order to sell Fruits of Philosophy, written by the American doctor Charles Knowlton over 40 years before. They sold 500 copies in the first twenty minutes at Guildhall, after which they were arrested. (Sounds like there was a demand for the book. Hm.) Three months later, they stood trial, in June 1877.
Women would not receive the vote in England until 1918, and even then, it was only extended to women over the age of 30. In 1928, women over the age of 21 were admitted to the ranks of voters, at last equal to men in this arena. Inequality persisted, of course. Still, during the previous century, women did agitate for progress on issues including women’s health, financial equality, and education–issues that are still typically “women’s issues” today–and found ways to define new roles for themselves in their rapidly changing world.