ABSTRACT
This chapter traces an increasing engagement with the concept of gender chronism over the course of three such juvenile historical novels/romances published in the first half of the nineteenth century. Gorham outlines the key aspects of subordinated femininity as applied to girls in the Victorian period: dependence on men; submission to men; a preference for a quiet life at home to a life of activity in public; a disposition characterized by innocence, purity, gentleness, and, above all, self-sacrifice; and a rejection of all anger, hostility, and ambition. Using soft constructionism as a frame, writers of women's history crafted stories of a society's progress towards an authentic femininity. As Claudia Johnson has shown, the canonical male-authored sentimental novels of the eighteenth century create their affect by disempowering the female, relying on a spectacle of suffering womanhood to elicit the melting humanity of male onlookers.
