Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens George Eliot and Henry James Deborah Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. As the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed in connection to women's culture and property law new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction are revealed.