The Religious Lives of Women in the Novels of George Eliot and Charlotte Mary Yonge

Abstract

This dissertation examines the novels of George Eliot and Charlotte Mary Yonge, showing how both authors imagine religious forms in ways that empower and liberate women. Although many feminist literary scholars perceive religious forms as by and large oppressive to women, these two Victorian novelists imagine them differently. Drawing on an understanding of realist fiction as creative rather than mimetic, a theory recently articulated by Anna Kornbluh, I show that even though Eliot and Yonge had very different religious beliefs and identities, they both created realist fiction that imagined similar possibilities. I apply Caroline Levine’s conception of forms to three Eliot novels and four Yonge novels in order to trace the effects of religious forms in these novels on the lives of women. I demonstrate that women in these novels are often empowered or liberated to move freely, speak publicly, and stand up for themselves to a degree not afforded by nineteenth-century secular society.