Masculinity in Women’s Literature

(An edited collection of scholarly essays)

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennett can never match the resourcefulness of his wife in her attempts to settle their five daughters in life; Edgar Linton in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a caricature of manliness; in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, an only daughter, Molly Gibson, proves to be a better child to her father than a son, Osborne Hamley, who fails his parents; George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss presents Maggie Tulliver as a far stronger, braver and tougher character than her brother Tom.