ABSTRACT
A recurring feature of writing about the nineteenth-century novel has been the belief that the Victorian woman was ‘the angel of the house . . . the still point in an age of capital whose perpetual crises show no sign of waning’,2 who was morally as well as socially detached from capitalism – in accordance with the ‘separate spheres’ model of men’s and women’s roles. This is typified by Nancy Armstrong’s account of the novel from the eighteenth century onwards as delineating a ‘specifically female curriculum’3 concerned with ‘the household, leisure time, courtship procedures and kinship relations’.4 She sets this in opposition to a male ‘political’ sphere whose concerns include class, status and money. Thus female characters who engage with money, such as the Bingley sisters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with their ‘mercenary lust’ or Blanche Ingram in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who is drawn to Rochester by an ‘acquisitive urge’,5 are condemned as failing to meet a norm of femininity.
