Ambitious Heights

How did the Victorian woman cope with the image of herself as a writer? What were the constraints on female friendships in a world centred on the pre-eminence of the husband? How significant for an ambitious woman were her politics about men? At the heart of this book, originally published in 1990, is a friendship between two women: Jane Carlyle and the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. But it was a difficult friendship, and in its difficulty lies much that is illuminating: about nineteenth-century domestic ideology; about writing for a market, and female fame; and about the complex ambivalences between women. Examining aspects of their lives, writing, and relationships, alongside those of two other writers Felicia Hemans and Geraldines sister, Maria Jane Norma Clarke provides a subtle and illuminating discussion of the possibilities that were open to women in the Victorian age.