Description

pp. x 228.”During the Victorian period thousands of women left England to seek work and new lives in the British colonies. This book examines the highly problematic issues surrounding the colonial emigration of unmarried Victorian women, revealing the many ways in which these women were regarded as cultural “excess.” Rita S. Kranidis explains how England had little use for spinsters, a category spanning the working class through the middle class, including domestic laborers, genteel women, and middle class widows. Kranidis brings together a variety of discourses, including historical, critical, literary, and theoretical, to form a critical evaluation of the events she investigates. This study questions the very premises and cultural foundations of evaluative systems that render some women/subjects more essential than others, and considers how the expulsion of problematic British subjects is a practice that permeates many facets of Victorian culture. The construction of gender, the meaning of emigration, and the idea of nation are all explored in the literature of the period alongside primary sources such as census figures and the popular press.”