Building on her previous research on Victorian women and material culture, Jill Rappoport’s new book explores how prominent nineteenth-century novelists imagined women’s economic agency during the surge of debates about married women’s property. She advances two main claims: first, fictional representations of women’s economic roles changed significantly in response to the 1870 and 1882 Married Women’s Property Acts. Second, several important novels show us how women’s new rights affected not only spousal relationships, as expected, but also relationships between siblings, mothers and sons, friends and acquaintances, and distant family in ways that reverberate throughout Victorian literature and culture. As such, Rappoport persuasively argues, novels are much more effective at representing the actual complexities of women’s property in the nineteenth century than the law itself.
The book’s argument hinges on a compelling explanation of how cultural attitudes changed towards two aspects of common law—coverture and primogeniture—during the nineteenth century, primarily in response to the increase in women’s property rights. In her introduction, Rappoport shows how, early in the century, coverture and primogeniture worked in tandem to disadvantage women economically: by robbing them of legal and economic identities once they were married and “covered” by their husbands and by privileging the rights of firstborn sons. She references Austen’s implicit criticisms of both laws through representations of the Dashwood and Bennet daughters, who must marry because they cannot inherit enough to live on and, once married, can only hope that their husbands’ “coverage” of them will be enough. Later in the century, however, as coverture came under increased scrutiny, especially in working-class marriages where husbands were seen as more likely to be neglectful and abusive, primogeniture began to gain favor in fiction. Chapters on Trollope and Eliot, for instance, show how women’s economic agency was represented as a threat against sons’ inheritance. The problem, Rappoport argues, is not that women owned property per se, but that they might alter the traditional vertical transmission of property by making unexpected economic decisions based on relationships not covered in the law.
Each of the chapters in Imagining Women’s Property traces multiple, extralegal modes of property ownership and transmission by “follow[ing] the money and other objects of women’s economic deliberations,” beginning with the official and unofficial wills appearing in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and the shared purse in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (p. 20). Rappoport explains how Dickens’s and Gaskell’s novels, published before the 1870 Act, both set forth a reliable, collaborative form of property ownership outside of the novels’ marriage plots, which functions as an implicit criticism of coverture while nonetheless reinforcing the importance of primogeniture. In her reading of Dickens, Rappoport shows how unrelated working women—Mrs. Boffin, Lizzie Hexam, and Betty Higdon—are given economic agency, but only in service of resolving a crisis in patrilineal inheritance that benefits several families. She then turns our attention to Gaskell’s siblings—Molly and Cynthia, Osborne and Roger—to illustrate how these dyads can embody healthy, mutually beneficial economic lives that serve as a far better model for spousal relationships than coverture. In one of the most interesting moments of the book, Rappoport applies an often-overlooked component of Darwinian theory, interdependence in beehive communities, to Gaskell’s representations of bee imagery, proving how fiction in the 1860s crafted a fantasy of shared ownership outside of marriage law.
The next three chapters discuss novels written after the passage of the 1870 Act, when discourse turned towards the subject of the 1882 Act: the expansion of rights for wealthier women and, incidentally, women who were more likely to disrupt their families’ financial traditions. Rappoport’s readings of Trollope, Eliot, and Oliphant indicate a sharp discursive turn in this decade, both in the novels’ criticism of women’s economic rights and their endorsement of firstborn sons’ inheritance at the expense of wives and mothers. The real fear, it seems, is that women would make economic choices outside of the expectations of their families. For instance, legally speaking, Lizzie Eustace from The Eustace Diamonds, Gwendolen Grandcourt from Daniel Deronda, and Mrs. John Vernon (and, later, her daughter Hester) in Hester own their diamonds and pearls. Yet, as Rappoport explains, all three unmarried women are vilified for their “theft” of these jewels at the expense of the presumed, though not legal, male heirs. But, she argues, that is not the end of the story: all three novelists also represent the extralegal factors and non-marital relationships at play in both ownership and transmission of these jewels, including gift-giving, morality, kinship, and loyalty, that allow these women economic agency. In her last chapter, Rappoport shows how Hester’s pearls, passed on from mother to daughter for multiple generations outside of traditional legal categories, are “individual and shared, personal and familial, present and future,” and therefore illustrative of the tension between legal and cultural understandings of property (p. 161). The fact that Hester holds space for Hester’s right to maternal property and her obligation to paternal family traditions is “an important point in favor of the new married women’s property laws which, like the pearls, were a fiercely contested legacy for a new generation of women” (p. 182). Together, these three chapters richly highlight the pressures family and culture exerted on women’s economic choices even after they gained more economic power than ever before—and ways around those pressures.
Rappoport’s book joins a solid and still-growing body of literature analyzing “property as a force more than an object” (p. 31). Drawing on thorough and wide-ranging research from material culture and gender studies, thing theory, and Victorian law and science, the book proves that fiction tells us more about women’s property in the Victorian era than the law does. Through evocative close readings of the novels and sustained engagement with criticism, Imagining Women’s Property turns our attention away from spousal relationships and towards a wide range of other relationships to show how revisions to married women’s property laws were imagined to affect the larger economy and culture of Victorian England. Rappoport’s scope—fiction by prominent writers from the mid-1860s to early 1880s—covers perspectives important to the cultural discourse during the decades most relevant to the reform movements, with brief forays into early fiction, Austen most notably. Yet, because she has such a fascinating argument, one cannot help but wonder what Rappoport would have uncovered if she had looked at lesser-known writers, or even other books by the same writers. Would we have seen the same patterns? What might we have learned about women’s property from Miss Havisham and Estella? From Pip and Magwitch? Similarly, what if Rappoport had pursued her topic into the 1890s or later? What might New Women novels have added to the argument, for instance? And what would the “follow the money” method reveal about early twentieth-century feminist fiction, such as Woolf’s and Bowen’s, especially as the discourse shifted towards suffrage, tied up inextricably as it was with property ownership? These would be fruitful areas of research for students and scholars interested in extending Rappoport’s argument. Moreover, a minor quibble I had with the Dickens chapter might offer up another possible avenue for further exploration. In her discussion of Our Mutual Friend, Rappoport argues that Dickens himself was working out his anxiety about intellectual property and copyright in his representations of the instability of Harmon’s will. Within the larger argument of the book, this claim seems a bit of an offshoot, taking the reader away from the far more interesting and relevant discussion of working women’s economic agency. Yet, more analysis of fiction-as-property, exploring the inadequacy of the law to manage it, would certainly be a rich vein to mine.
Finally, it is worth saying a few words about Rappoport’s provocative afterword, in which she turns her attention to the reverberations of her argument in the twenty-first century—from gendered expectations of service, collaboration, and invisible labor, to pay gaps and care-giving expectations. While she focuses on women’s labor generally, one can also look at the very industry in which Rappoport is working to see that some of these narratives and policies are still active today, especially since, as she notes in her acknowledgements, her promotion to full professor was contingent on finishing this book and, in the afterword, that women spend more time at the associate professor level than men. Perhaps, then, Imagining Women’s Property is not only a compelling narrative of the complexities of women’s property in the nineteenth century but also a call to action to recognize the ways existing legal and economic structures in academia itself (tenure and promotion, publishing, conference attendance and presentations) fail to account for the lived reality of twenty-first-century academic women’s economic lives.
University of California Press