Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

In the mid-Victorian period women have been represented in many different ways, using various forms of literature, for example through poetry, novels, and newspaper articles and also in visual form through paintings and etchings, they show how women were represented, how fathers, husbands and society treated them in general. The mid-Victorian period is classified as being around 1851-1870, a period of ‘intense and prolific activity in literature, especially by novelists and poets, philosophers and essayists,’ (The Critical Poet). Unlike the earlier romantic 19th century novels of Jane Austen whose characters such as Elizabeth Bennett lived happily ever after, Victorian novelist George Eliot, broke the tradition of the standard romantic novel by representing women in unhappy relationships and the reality and problems of the woman’s role in life and their place in society, this is particularly evident in her realist novel Middlemarch. Another example of the way women were represented in the mid-Victorian period is in poetry such as Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ who is bound by the web she weaved within the confines of ‘Four gray walls and four gray towers’, (p755, line 15, Romantic Period Verse), but once s