Woman and the Demon

Nina Auerbach was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania.

A daring and important book of cultural criticism… Woman and the Demon is beautifully written and even moving. Undertaking no less than a subversive rereading of Victorian culture, Nina Auerbach attempts to make available to the 20th century certain aspects of that culture which we have learned to dismiss with contempt at great cost to ourselves… Briefly her thesis is this: Where feminist criticism has consistently exposed the repressive implications of the Victorian myth of woman as ‘angel in the house,’ that myth actually disguises another dominant but unformulated myth—the myth of woman as demonic, polymorphous, vital, dangerous and transcendent… She extends her study as comfortably to Dickens as to Brontë, to Robert Browning as to Christina Rossetti, to Thomas Carlyle as to Florence Nightingale; and she reads these writers on the terms traditionally offered. Yet she changes them for us irrevocably… [Her] argument is outrageous, provocative and convincing.

• * Introduction * The Myth of Womanhood: Victims * The Myth of Womanhood: Queens * Angels and Demons: Woman's Marriage of Heaven and Hell * Old Maids and the Wish for Wings * The Rise of the Fallen Woman * Victorian Womanhood and Literary Character * Epilogue: The Death of Character and the Fight for Womanhood * Notes * Index