• Asma Alameroo

  Author

In re-reading the history of Victorian women, we find that women have faced many challenges in the process of advocating for their rights. They faced social conditions and the common law that prevented them from voting, having the freedom to select whom to marry or love, and having the right to sue. The situation of women led some Victorian writers to topics related to women’s rights in both prose and poetry. Through these writings, many authors discussed women’s issues in an indirect manner.
Another issue related to social conditions that women had to grapple with was class. Women were in practice controlled by their class; a woman who was upper class had to marry someone else from the upper class, for example. In addition, Julie English Early discussed women’s status during Victorian age specially “social barriers” throughout the novel [The Divine Fire (1904)]. She clarified that:
Despite social barriers, the upper-class woman and the lower middle class man recognize their love and their mutual exclusion to emerge “as classless and iconoclastic modern individuals” (188). Young concludes: the novel “has opened in the decorous world of the nineteenth-century novel[…] and has ended in the passionate turmoil of early twentieth-century modernism” (186). (Julie 347)
Here we can see that women suffered from “social barriers” that were even found in their private lives. One example of the “social barriers” is the class differences found in the Victorian age. Literature, in its indirect way, was a method for helping women deal with and understand these obstacles.
In the Victorian age, we find that women of that time were controlled by the roles that society allocated to them. In the introduction of “A Widening Sphere—Changing Roles of Victorian Women,” Martha Vicinus wrote that:

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