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Palgrave Macmillan

The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature

From Austen to Woolf

  • Book
  • © 2002

Overview

Authors:
  1. Valerie Sanders

    1. University of Hull, UK

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 1-10

  3. The Brother and Sister Culture

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 11-31

  4. Brother-Sister Collaborative Relationships

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 32-56

  5. ‘One of the Highest Forms of Friendship’: Brother-Sister Relationships in Women’s Autobiography

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 57-79

  6. The Brother as Lover

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 80-105

  7. The Family Revenge Novel

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 106-129

  8. Changing Places: Siblings and Cross-Gendering

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 130-154

  9. ‘Most Unwillingly Alive’: Brothers and Sisters in the First World War

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 155-179

  10. Conclusion

    • Valerie Sanders
    Pages 180-185

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 186-223
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Keywords

About this book

This book argues that brother-sister relationships, idealized by the Romantics, intensified in nineteenth-century English domestic culture, and is a neglected key to understanding Victorian gender relations. Attracted by the apparent purity of the sibling bond, novelists and poets also acknowledged its innate ambivalence and instability, through conflicting patterns of sublimated devotion, revenge fantasy, and corrosive obsession. The final chapter shows how the brother-sister bond was permanently changed by the experience of the First World War.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Hull, UK

    Valerie Sanders

About the author

VALERIE SANDERS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Hull. Previous publications include Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in 19th Century England and Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists. She has also edited Harriet Martineau: Selected Letters and Records of Girlhood: Nineteenth-Century Women's Childhoods.

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