Affective Labour in British and American Women’s Fiction, 1848-1915

This volume is a comprehensive and transatlantic literary study of women’s nineteenth-and-twentieth-century fiction. Firstly, it introduces and explores the concept of women’s affective labour, and examines literary representations of this work in British and American fiction written by women between 1848 and 1915. Secondly, it revives largely ignored texts by the “scribbling women” of Britain and America, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mona Caird, and Mary Hunter Austin, and rereads established authors, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin, and Edith Wharton, to demonstrate how all these works provide valuable insights into women’s lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, by adopting the lens of affective labour, the study explores the ways in which women were portrayed as striving for self-fulfilment through forms of emotional, mental, and creative endeavours that have not always been fully appreciated as ‘work’ in critical accounts of nineteenth-and-twentieth-century fiction.