The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Books

Abstract

As a theme with high cultural visibility, the heroic was represented in all media of the Victorian and Edwardian years. Barbara Korte investigates 50 years of gift books showing how the genre reflected gender ideology aimed at initiating readers into the dominant beliefs and values of Victorian and Edwardian society. Targeting young female readers, the books examined show narratives and visual illustrations of exemplary heroism performed by women, as well as peritext (prefaces and introductions) that made their didactics explicit. While they compromise with the hegemonic understanding of femininity as domestic, these books also demonstrate that women can have an agency as extraordinarily heroic as that of a man, pointing to new gender models emerging.