The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Introduction: ‘Kitchen Literature’

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 1-13

3. ‘Let nothing ever induce you to read novels’: Servants and Sensationalism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 15-36

4. ‘Merely telling the truth’: Servants’ Stories in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 37-62

5. ‘No human being ever was created for this’: The Servant Victim in the Works of Wilkie Collins

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 63-89

6. ‘Privileged spies’: The Criminal Servant in Lady Audley’s Secret

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 90-114

7. ‘She had her rôle to play’: East Lynne and the Servant Actress

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 115-140

8. ‘We will still be husband and wife’: The Servant as Spouse in Gaskell’s ‘The Grey Woman’

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 141-166

9. ‘The stuff of lurid fiction’: Sensation Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

   • Elizabeth Steere

   Pages 167-185

10. Back Matter

    Pages 186-210

    PDF

The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: 'Kitchen Literature' explores why Victorian sensation fiction was derided as literature fit only for maids and cooks and how the depictions of fictional female domestics, from Jane Eyre to Neo-Victorian novels, reflect contemporary social concerns about the blurring of the boundaries of class and gender.

• English literature
• fiction
• gender
• novel
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

Elizabeth Steere currently teaches in the English department at the University of West Georgia, USA. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia and has published articles focusing on class and gender issues in nineteenth-century British literature.

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