Clever Girls and the Literature of Women's Upward Mobility

Mary Eagleton was, formerly, Professor of Contemporary Women’s Writing at Leeds Beckett University, UK.  She has published widely on contemporary women authors, feminist literary theory and feminist literary history. Publications include Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction (2005), Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (3rd revised edition, 2011) and, with Emma Parker, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1970 – the Present (2015).

“The book as a whole is based on an impressive body of research … . It is thoroughly up to date, commenting on recently published literary texts as well as on the latest political developments. The writing is extremely lucid and readable throughout. This is an important study, which will be valuable to literary critics and particularly to cultural historians.” (Faye Hammill, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 38 (2), 2019)          “Eagleton’s ambitious book includes attention to novels, memoirs and dramas that foreground a change in class status for women since the Second World War. … Both primary and secondary texts are diverse in their origins and methods, and one of the strengths of the book is Eagleton’s wide scope on both fronts. … Eagleton’s own terminology is continuously sensitive to the social pressures that complicate social mobility … .” (Mary M. McGlynn, Literature & History, Vol. 28 (2), November, 2019)“Mary Eagleton’s impressive study … provides a thoroughgoing social and political history of women’s education – and an illustrative account of the ways in which the routes to upward mobility flowed and ebbed – from the post-war era to the present. She adopts a novel interdisciplinary approach, a model hybrid literary/social study that maps the course of women’s upward mobility through literature and supported by history, showing how this forms a trajectory that rises and declines from one precarious era to another.” (Sue Kennedy, Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 28 (5), 2019)“A rich study of social mobility that combines a cultural history of a rapidly changing Britain with an authoritative literary critical analysis of the texts (primarily novels, but also autobiography and drama) that address women’s roles and shifting aspirations across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. … Eagleton writes with authority and style, presenting a text that is urgent, compelling, and eminently readable.” (Fiona Tolan, English - Journal of the English Association, February, 15, 2019)

• 1. Introduction: The Language of Upward Mobility.- 2. Escaping Origins.- 3.Relative Values: Career, Marriage, Maternity.- 4. Troublesome Bodies.- 5. New Forms, New Selves.- 6. ‘Top Girls’ and Other Epithets.- 7. ‘The Haves’ and ‘the Have-Nots’.- 8. Coda: Phantom Feminism.