In the Victorian age the figure of the ‘kept woman’ was largely synonymous with the ‘fallen woman’ – a woman who worked as a prostitute or as a mistress. Such characters appear in painting, most notably in Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853, Tate Britain), a picture whose title tells us so much about Victorian attitudes as her conscience is awoken, but not the conscience of her smiling, raffish seducer. But what is she thinking, beyond the desire to be free? Clearly, there is more to the concept of the kept woman than we might at first surmise.
In Readers and Mistresses, Katie R. Peel explores the representation of this type as it appears in Victorian literature rather than art. Her approach is dynamic and interesting: rejecting traditional definitions of the morally iniquitous female, she ‘collapse[s] the distinctions between kept women and sex workers, sex workers and wives’ (9). In so doing, she is able to explore the writing of the female experience in a period when being ‘kept’ was primarily about ‘survival in a time when women had little socioeconomic or political agency, and few resources’ (7). This approach necessitates a revision of what being ‘kept’ means, and Peel redefines the concept as a matter of care-giving; sometimes it involves a transaction that takes place between women and men, and sometimes between women; it may be loving or tempestuous; it may involve sex, but it doesn’t have to. Peel insists that this strategy allows us to read the fictional women as being ‘alike’ (190), a process that facilitates a more sympathetic way of reading and enables us to ‘enact narrative justice’ (193) for characters who might otherwise be condemned. In this reading, all female characters are placed on a level, united by the desire to lead dignified lives rather than being reduced to emblems of indecent sexuality.
Women taking care of women: Laura turning to Marion when frightened on their evening walk, in Collins's The Woman in White. [Click on the image to enlarge it, and for more information.]
This new notion of being kept is teased out in five closely written chapters, in each case offering a detailed analysis of well-known Victorian texts. Within this structure Peel offers many new insights. In chapter one, for instance, she argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford is ‘a story of women taking care of women’ (26), while Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White can be read as a refiguring of the family in which ‘Marian … is kept first by her sister, and then by her sister and husband’ (36). These readings exemplify the wider definition of the kept that Peel proposes, and she expands this analysis in her comments on the characters who are more traditionally ‘fallen,’ focusing on Nancy in Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Gaskell’s heroine in Ruth (chapter 2). In each case it is possible to make a stigma-free interpretation, and Peel is insistent that much of this work of sympathy-building was enacted by the authors for the readers of their own time. Both Ruth and Nancy are cared for as much as kept, and Dickens and Gaskell aimed, Peel argues, to ‘wrest [the characters] from the conventional narrative of the harlot’s progress’ (77). Other chapters explore the nuances of this revisionary perspective, and especially insightful are the sections exploring the nightmarish interaction of ‘wives and mistresses’ in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (chapter 3), the near-mistress-like relationship of Jane Eyre to Rochester (chapter 5), and the writing of Lydia in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (chapter 4). In each section, Peel explores the intricacies of the authors’ moral and formal dilemmas as they strove to negotiate social conventionalities and reader expectation, a task that involved a bold engagement with the culture(s) of the time. Peel encapsulates that struggle in her comments on Eliot’s Lydia, arguing that:
In her characterization of Lydia, Eliot casts the body as well as the location of the kept mistress as a site of revision, In so doing she responds to medical, legal, social, and religious discourses that alternately objectified, erased, overlooked, or vilified the women who lived as wives to men who were not their husbands. (127)
Cared for as much as kept: Ruth and Henry Bellingham in the frontispiece of Gaskell's Ruth and Other Tales. [Click on the image to enlarge it, and for more information.]
That thesis is well sustained throughout, and Peel makes many connections which would not otherwise be seen, uncovering strata of meanings and new ways of reading the texts. At the same time the impact of her arguments is occasionally undermined by small factual errors that should have been picked up – for example, Dickens’s Dombey and Son was published in book format in 1848, not 1846 (169). It is also the case that some of Peel’s claims are needlesssly contentious or inconsistent, at least for this reader. In particular, her linkage of George Eliot’s personal circumstances as a kept woman with her writing of the family is not consistent with her deployment of a feminist methodology. Peel claims that it is ‘hard to imagine’ that Eliot’s (purported) experience as G. H. Lewes’s companion, was not reflected in her fiction (124); I take the point, but the use of a biographical perspective does not mesh with the book’s general approach and, once again, undermines its effectiveness.
I was puzzled, moreover, by Peel’s use of the term ‘queer,’ which she takes to have multiple meanings, particularly the capacity of some relationships to disrupt traditional patriarchal structures and the ‘privileging of relationships and affections between women’ (3), so that the ‘central relationship of Marian and Laura,’ the sisters in Collins’s The Women in White is ‘indeed queer’ (38) – a claim that will stop most readers of Collins in their tracks. In fact, ‘queer’ is repeatedly used in the second sense to mean nothing more than ‘affectionate,’ ‘dutiful’ and ‘loving,’ and in this context does not have a sexual connotation. Peel includes some theorizing of her use of the term, but I think many will find this definition inappropriate and confusing, inevitably adding a series of sexual implications, with inferences of lesbianism, which are not borne out by the texts. Is the relationship between Marian and Laura really ‘queer’ in its closeness? Surely, it’s just ordinary sisterliness? And are the supportive women in Cranford ‘queer’ in their mutuality? To me, the epithet ‘queer’ is redundant when it is used in this manner.
Nevertheless, and bearing in mind some reservations, Readers and Mistresses is a valuable addition to criticism of the Victorian novel. It will be of interest to gender theorists and cultural historians as well as literary scholars, and fits perfectly into its series as one of Manchester’s ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century.’ Taken as a whole, Peel’s arguments are well supported by extensive notes as she offers many detailed readings of the texts and some sharp critical judgments. Most importantly, she achieves her critical objective as she revises notions of the kept woman while elucidating many of the ways in which Victorian authors presented their problematic female characters to a critical reading public. As I noted earlier, there is more to the kept woman than the conflicted figure in The Awakening Conscience, and Peel ensures that we see that figure in all of its complexity, and with fresh eyes.
Bibliography
[Book under review] Peel, Katie R. Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. 232 pp. Hardback, £85.00. ISB 978-1526176479
Created 2 January 2025