Genres of Nineteenth-Century Single Women and the Global Anglophone World

Abstract

This project places an unlikely figure at the center of the international order: the single woman. Unmarried women in nineteenth-century literature were often denigrated as hapless “spinsters,” unfortunate by-products of old-fashioned and patriarchal expectations for women’s lives. Paradoxically, the character of the spinster is also privileged: she is assumed to be middle-class, white, and tenuously respectable. In this project, I expand the archive of the single woman beyond the white spinster to encompass a more globally diverse range of authors, characters, and national experiences. If the “proper” female subject was meant to secure the future of the nation through the children she bore, then the authors I study explored alternative paths for women to participate in national and global communities from beyond the patriarchal family unit. Rather than consign the single woman to the abject margins of her social world, I emphasize how the unmarried women of global Anglophone literature consolidate new models of national femininity and global community, allowing their texts to reimagine the relationship between a nation, a community, a world, and its women – between the public and the private.