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The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England. By Dorice Williams Elliott. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2002. x + 270 pages.
The Angel out of the House picks up on commonly analyzed themes in Victorian literature and culture, but it brings to their discussion a new perspective. Particularly, Dorice Williams Eliott returns to the long-recognized association between the duties a Victorian lady performed in her home and the philanthropic work she undertook in society, the latter a seemingly logical extension of her domestic labors in the household. For Elliott, the seeming logic of philanthropy as woman's proper work was actually fragile and frequently challenged by those who feared any service in the public sphere might prove coarsening for a lady. Whereas previous studies-like F. K. Prochaska's and Anne Summers's-have tended to focus on the actual philanthropic work performed by historical figures as well as its reception and ideological justifications, Dorice Williams Elliott is interested in work of another sort, the cultural work performed by literary texts in depicting upperand middle-class women engaged in public philanthropy. Elliott is interested, in short, in how representations of women in the public sphere affected gender and class roles and served to pave the way for women to emerge as professional workers in a variety of other contexts.
Elliott argues that the frequent representation in literature of women engaged in charitable work helped to make it acceptable even as those representations began subtly to forge new models of female professional life. This is a solid analysis that builds not only on historical studies of women's philanthropy but relates also to other recent studies, like that of Monica F. Cohen (Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and...