Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Centur ...

Chapter 1

Feminism and the Canon: Recovery and Reconsideration of Popular Novelists

Pamela K. Gilbert

No one can accuse me of any political prejudices. My writings have alternately been accused of a reactionary conservatism and a dangerous socialism, so that I may without presumption claim to be impartial: I love conservatism when it means the preservation of beautiful things, I love revolution when it means the destruction of vile ones.

—Ouida, A Village Commune (377)

As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is an excellent time to pause and look back over a now forty-year project of feminist recovery.