Feminist lives in Victorian England : private roles and public commitment. / Philippa Levine.

Preface: configuring feminism historically. Part 1 Private lives: family, faith and politics; reappropriating adulthood; understanding the empty places - love, friendship, and women's networks. Part 2 Public commitment: disrupting the dark continent; breaking the male monopoly - politics, law and feminism; invading the public sphere - employment, education and the middle class women; nurturing the sickly plants - women, labour and unionism. Conclusion: organizing principles - re-reading the political geneaology of feminism.

In employing a theoretical perspective culled from contemporary feminist scholarship, this analysis goes beyond such traditional categories as class, evangelicalism, liberalism, and latterly socialism, to a recognition of the centrality of gender in the making of 19th-century politics.