Lexington Books
Pages: 204
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-66690-307-2 • Hardback • November 2024 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-66690-308-9 • eBook • November 2024 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Henna Messina is assistant professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University.
Chapter 1
Competing Visions of Domestic Agency in Jane Collier and Sarah Scott
Chapter 2
Negotiating Inheritance in Frances Burney’s Cecilia
Chapter 3
Domestic Assemblages in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
Chapter 4
Independence and the Inhospitable Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
Chapter 5
Professional Domesticity in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
"In an incisive analysis of how displacement and dispossession lie at the heart of domestic fiction, Henna Messina examines novels by Burney, Austen, Brontë, and Gaskell, drawing attention to the moment when the heroine is expelled from the comfort of a family home. Domestic space then becomes precarious for these homeless and dependent young women as they enter into the domiciles of women, who, though entrusted with their care, proceed to torment them as a way to exercise their limited power. Messina argues that despite the cruelty and confinement of these hostile domestic spaces, the protagonists achieve some agency through manipulating the very materiality of those spaces. In our current political climate, the issues raised in Precarious Domesticity and the British Novel could not be more timely."
— Beth Tobin, University of Georgia