Abstract
Abstract
Margaret Oliphant’s Hester uses the intense feelings provoked by a pearl necklace to explore two different models for thinking about women’s relationship to property: changing legal rights and family traditions. Awareness of these two models allows us to see how the novel takes what initially appears to be a contest between a naïve, helpless wife and a successful, single businesswoman and transforms it into opposing visions of daughters, one who manages to protect a maternal legacy for herself and the next generation against another who cannot. This shift in perspective forces us to see how these roles coexist, in tension, and also changes how we understand characters’ choices and relationships. Suggesting that their newfound rights to private property will not make women abandon other family traditions, Hester remains ambivalent about the costs and benefits of these rights and reminds us of the other extralegal forces and relational obligations that continued to shape women’s financial lives.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
Reference391 articles.
1. Ablow, Rachel. “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act.” In BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=rachel-ablow-one-flesh-one-person-and-the-1870-married-womens-property-act.