Choice reviews Educating Women

R. T. Van Arsdel, emeritus, University of Puget Sound

Green (Northeastern Univ.) explores the tensions between Victorian women's aspirations for higher education and the reality of their responsibilities for home, family, and domestic values. The author links these struggles to "larger Victorian cultural conflicts over gender and identities." She supports her thesis with discussions of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Anna Harriette Leonowens's less-familiar memoir The English Governess at the Siamese Court. Green chose these texts because they were written during times of intense debate over middle-class Englishwomen's relationship to higher education and because all of the authors were affected, in one way or another, by educational deprivation. Particularly interesting is the analysis of Leonowens's book, which was the basis for Anna and the King of Siam. Well written and well researched, this study will provoke lively discussion in upper-division undergraduate and graduate seminars.

Choice