Gender and the reception of Victorian novels: Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights', Anthony Trollope's 'Barchester Towers', Charles Reade's 'It Is Never Too Late To Mend', and Charlotte Yonge's 'The Heir of Redclyffe'

This study investigates the role gender played in the reception of Victorian novels and concludes that gender was not only an analytical category used by Victorian reviewers to conceptualize, interpret, and evaluate novels, but in some cases the primary and most significant category. Reception and reader-response theories are used to analyze over 100 nineteenth-century reviews; this analysis reveals that Victorian constructions of literary reputations were informed by Victorian preconceptions about gender and writing.;A central factor in the assessment of literary value was the degree to which the writer and work conformed to Victorian ideologies of gender. This analysis of the critical reception of Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and later works, and Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, explores how conformity with, and deviance from, gender roles affected reviewers' judgments. Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late To Mend and Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe were both seen as consistent with critics' preconceptions about appropriate masculine and feminine writing and were praised accordingly. The writing of Anthony Trollope and Emily Bronte, however, deviated from reviewers' gendered expectations, thus problematizing their critical reception. Male writers, such as Trollope, were thus also vulnerable to the masculine/feminine hierarchies of Victorian literary criticism, and women writers, such as Yonge, could sometimes benefit from such criteria: Yonge conformed so closely to the idealized view of feminine writing that she is chivalrously elevated to the status of "angel in the circulating library.";This study aims to make a concrete contribution to scholarship on gender and reception, particularly to scholarship on the effects of gender on reception during the Victorian period. Empirical evidence obtained from neglected nineteenth-century periodicals provides distinct textual examples which substantiate often generalized speculations about the influence of gender on reception, and demonstrate that reading and evaluation are historical, cultural, and social processes.