"An assured asylum against every evil": Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and mid-eighteenth-century philanthropic institutions for women -- "The care of the poor is her profession": Hannah More and naturalizing women's philanthropic work -- Hannah More's heirs: women philanthropists and the challenge of political economy -- "The communion of labor" and Lectures to Ladies: a midcentury contest between male professionals and female philanthropists -- The female visitor and the marriage of classes in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South -- Educating women's desires: the philanthropic heroine in the 1860s -- George Eliot's Middlemarch: the failure of the philanthropic heroine
Summary
"In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious. And although many scholars have dismissed women's volunteer endeavors as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works of women writers - among them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More and Anna Jameson - was crucial to the redefinition of gender roles and class relations."--BOOK JACKET
