Representing femininity

Corbett's study explores the relationship between women's experience and the social institutions and cultural forms in which that experience is publicly represented. Challenging the assumption that middle-class Victorian and Edwardian women were confined solely to domesticity, Corbett examines the rhetorical strategies of self-representation by women who participated in public life. She argues that those strategies enabled such women writers as Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie to create an autobiographical and cultural paradigm privileging private life over public…