ABSTRACT
At first glance, Elizabeth Sewell seems a paradigm of Victorian orthodoxy. Born in Newport, Isle of Wight, in 1815, the second girl in a solidly prosperous and middle-class household, she was a dutiful daughter and sister, who, since she never married, dedicated herself to easing domestic troubles, and always regarded family duties as paramount. Deeply devout, she built her life on Christian principles, and her moral and social attitudes derived essentially from her religious beliefs. As an educator of girls she was involved in a sphere of activity considered most suitable for her sex and position. As a writer, she produced a wide range of works, including thirteen novels and three volumes of short stories, religious and educational treatises, history and language textbooks, and travel books, most of which seem primarily inspired by a conventional didacticism. In general, the twentieth century has persisted in treating her mainly as a writer of juvenile and religious literature, focusing chiefly on her two early novels, Amy Herbert (1844) and Laneton Parsonage (1846), both of which concentrate on children's behaviour in relation to doctrinal issues. 1 It is however quite misleading to claim that Sewell had nothing to say to the adults of her generation or that she was totally unquestioning of her own society and its ideologies. As several recent critical studies have pointed out, much of her work is deeply concerned with problems crucial to her own sex, and establishes her within a sisterhood of Victorian women writers sharing similar preoccupations.2 Her attitudes are often surprisingly unorthodox, and, without overt radicalism, she champions a far more challenging vision of independent womanhood than many of her contemporaries dared or wished to assert.
