Mistress of the House

This exploration of gender and property ownership in eight important novels argues that property is a decisive undercurrent in narrative structures and modes as well as an important gender signature in society and culture. Tim Dolin suggests that the formal development of nineteenth-century domestic fiction can only be understood in the context of changes in the theory and laws of property: indeed femininity and its representation cannot be considered separately from property relations and their reform. He presents original readings of novels in which a woman owns acquires or loses property focusing on exchanges between patriarchal cultural authority the 'woman question' and narrative form and on the place of domestic fiction in a culture in which property relations and gender relations are subject to radical review. Each chapter revolves around a representative text but refers substantially to other material both other novels and contemporary social legal political and feminist commentary.