Figures of sympathy: Womanly redefinition in the fiction of British women writers (George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell)

This dissertation examines particular moments in the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers in order to investigate how their evolving conceptualizations of sympathy contributed to their cultural and literary projects. These writers' understandings of woman's relationship to sympathy responded to cultural attitudes about female nature and manifested themselves in the literary forms that these writers developed in their fiction. Although much attention has been focused on the visual nature of the sympathetic scenes that women writers staged in their fiction, this study highlights the figures of the sympathetic woman that these writers represented.; These figures often reflected a longstanding tension between conceptions of woman's faculties of intellect and her faculties of emotion—a tension central to debates about the nature of sympathy. For instance, early in the nineteenth century, women writers of social reform fiction differentiated between the informed and the misinformed benefactress; later in the century, George Eliot offered a version of these characters in her development of the cultured and the silly woman; and among modernist women writers, Virginia Woolf developed the figure of the woman reader who could balance her aptitudes for sympathy and judgment towards the cultivation of her individual taste. In terms of their social import, all of these figures corresponded to an ever-widening expansion of female space that reached from the hearthside, to the salon, to “a room of one's own,” respectively.; These figures of sympathy not only contributed to the conventions that have come to be identified with the realist heroine, they also signaled an effort on the behalf of their creators to reshape cultural perceptions about female identity. Women writers' strategies of sympathy assume particular import because they helped to shape women's relationship to the literary marketplace, their political and social status, and their relationship to public and private space. In these respects, the authors under discussion—including writers of social reform fiction, such as Jane Marcet, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as established canonical writers such as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf—worked both with and against established cultural ideas of womanly sympathy toward these objectives.