HomeWorks

HomeWorks Glossary

Here we offer basic definitions of terms and biographical information on writers featured on our website. The Glossary is organized by teaching module. On the modules you will find detailed information.

“Writing Home”

Archives: Archives are collections of written materials and, in some cases, of objects from the past. Scholars rely on them to understand history. Archives are also themselves part of the history they reflect — they are not neutral parties. Archives are not necessarily objective or inclusive, and we need to understand how they themselves reflect attitudes, practices and biases of the past. This critical approach is particularly important in that archives tend to house only written records; enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, and that oppression reverberates to this day. We need to be mindful of how we use archives, and understand their particular history and troubled legacies.

Epistolary Novel: This unit talks about letters, including those embedded in works of fiction and poetry. “Epistle” is a word for letter, and the “Epistolary Novel” or novel of letters became popular in the 18th century. Early examples include Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1814). The letter form remains popular to this day, making it into the movie- and internet-age (see for instance You’ve Got Mail (1998), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan).

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, where her father, philosopher Bronson Alcott, counted Transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau among his friends. Louisa worked as a teacher but also took on domestic service to alleviate her family’s poverty. During the American Civil War, she worked as a nurse in Washington D.C., and her letters home inspired Hospital Sketches (1863). Best known today for Little Women (1868) and her other books written for and about children, her work is as much a reflection of the constraints as it is an exploration of the creative possibilities of domestic life. 

Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, novelist, short story writer, orator, educator, anti-slavery and women’s rights activist; Frances E.W. Harper was an accomplished writer who advocated for the abolition of slavery and the creation of new educational opportunities for African Americans. Born into a free black family in Baltimore and educated at a school for African American children run by her uncle, Harper worked as a nursemaid and seamstress before joining the faculty at Union Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio, to teach domestic science. Unable to return to Maryland, which had passed legislation to enslave free African Americans living in the North, she dedicated herself to the abolitionist movement, which she advanced by publishing poetry and working as a traveling lecturer. A fervent supporter of women’s suffrage, Harper explored the core tenets of her political activism and writerly commitments in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy, which traces a mixed-race family’s experience of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction era and explores the political possibilities and limitations of reinventing home.

“Victorian Mothers and Children at Home”

Victorian Era: Strictly speaking, the Victorian era is synonymous with the period of Queen Victoria’s reign on the British throne: 1837-1901. More broadly, the term applies to a period that extends from the early nineteenth century into the early twentieth century and encompasses a set of significant social, scientific, and technological changes: the rise of the middle classes, and with it an emphasis on middle-class morality and domesticity; the continuing growth of industry, alongside a focus on economic reform; and a series of scientific innovations and discoveries, including Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the invention of photography, and the widespread adoption of germ theory. 

Children’s literature: Scholars have defined “children’s literature” variously as literature “about children,” “written for children,” or “written by children.” The age range for “children’s literature” is similarly broad, ranging from early readers up and through the boundaries of Young Adult (YA) fiction. As Kimberly Reynolds has argued, “there is no clearly identifiable body of ‘children’s literature’ any more than there is something that could be called ‘adults’ literature’, nor are the two areas of publishing as separate as these labels suggest.” The so-called “Golden Age” of children’s literature, one of the foci of this module, ran from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century and included many known texts by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, L. M. Montgomery, Johanna Spyri, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain. “Golden Age” children’s literature helped shape the genre we recognize today, combining didacticism and moral pedagogy with play, humor, and an emphasis on the childhood imagination.

Serialization: Nineteenth-century “serialization” refers to the formats in which fiction was published, most often in weekly and monthly installments in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. Fiction serialized in this way was often published alongside poetry, news articles, nonfiction essays, and advertisements. While many well-known novels were serialized, including those by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy, much serialization fiction was written by women and pitched toward a female audience and/or domestic family unit. For an analysis of Victorian serial fiction in relation to contemporary television formats, see the Special Issue on “Television for Victorianists” from Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. 

Elizabeth Gaskell was a novelist, biographer, and short story writer who lived her adult life in Manchester, England as the wife of a Unitarian minister. Her fictions, which include the novels Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851-53), and North and South (1854-55), often focused on the lives of women and domestic units in the industrial north of England. 

Lady Clementina Hawarden was an amateur photographer in an age in which it was unusual for women to take up photography. Between 1857 and 1864, she took over 800 photographs, mostly of her adolescent daughters inside of their family home in London. She exhibited her work at the Photographic Society of London in 1863.

Julia Margaret Cameron converted her domestic space, including a chicken coop, into a photography studio as she taught herself the art in the early 1860s. As she exhibited widely throughout the 1860s, including in Berlin and Dublin, she became known for her soft-focus portraits, including those of famous men (Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson among others). Like Hawarden, she also photographed her children, family members, and close associates at her home on the Isle of Wight. 

Frances Hodgson Burnett: Born in England, Burnett spent her life moving between the US and the UK, publishing widely in both countries. Called a “New Woman” after her divorce, and criticized for her “unfeminine” ways, Burnett continued to publish domestic and children’s fiction (among other genres). A keen businesswoman, she arranged her own publishing contracts and fought to have the legal rights to her characters (so that other writers could not make use of them without permission). 

Louisa Maud Montgomery: Born in Prince Edward Island, L. M. Montgomery took a teaching degree before studying literature at Dalhousie University and teaching school (not unlike her most famous literary character, Anne Shirley). Like Burnett, Montgomery aimed to make a profit from her writing, and she fought her publishers in a series of legal battles for control of her well-known heroine.

“Art and the House Beautiful: Victorian Poet Michael Field”

Aestheticism (also the Aesthetic Movement) was an art movement, both practical and theoretical, of the late 19th century supporting an emphasis on aesthetic value and effects— in preference to the socio-political themes and positions— of literature, fine arts, music and other arts. This meant that the art of the movement was produced with a view toward being beautiful first and foremost, rather than serving a moral, allegorical, doctrinal or other such purpose — “art for art’s sake”. It was particularly prominent in England during the late 19th century, supported by notable writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, having started in a small way in the 1860s in the studios and houses of a radical group of artists and designers, including William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Michael Field was a pseudonym used for the poetry and verse drama of the English authors Katharine Harris Bradley (27 October 1846 – 26 September 1914) and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper (12 January 1862 – 13 December 1913). As Field they wrote around 40 works together, and a long journal Works and Days. Their intention was to keep the pen-name secret, but it became public knowledge, not long after they had confided in their friend Robert Browning. They wrote a number of passionate love poems to each other, and their name Michael Field was their way of declaring their inseparable oneness. Friends referred to them as the Fields, the Michaels or the Michael Fields. They had a range of pet names for each other. They also were passionately devoted to their pets, in particular a dog named Whym Chow, for whom they wrote a book of poems named after him. They were Aestheticists, strongly influenced by the thoughts of Walter Pater.

Paragon House: In 1899, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the penname Michael Field, moved to 1, The Paragon, in Richmond, London. This was the first time they had lived together alone, without the interference of family members. This home became a work of art in its own right.

“Diverging Domesticities”

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of the foremost US poets of the 19th century, Dickinson lived in her father’s house in Amherst, MA all of her life and did not oversee publication of any of the almost 1800 poems found at her death. Rather, she sent many poems in letters to correspondents and organized them in small, hand sewn booklets called fascicles. Her short, riddling poems were not collected in a complete volume until 1955. In 2012, the manuscripts of her poems were finally made digitally available through the Emily Dickinson Archive. For more information about all aspects of her life and work, consult The Emily Dickinson Museum.

Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) was part of a large family impoverished by the death of the father. Her mother moved the family from the seaside town of Beverly to Lowell, Massachusetts, bought and ran a rooming house for the young women who came to work in the textile mills to better their situations. A dreamy bookworm, Larcom  started working in the mills at around ten years old, which is also where she started to write and publish poetry. She eventually became a teacher, and wrote movingly about her childhood in her memoir, A New England Girlhood. For more information about Larcom and helpful exercises about her historical moment, see “Mill Girl Writer Lucy Larcom Dies.”

Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891) was a member of the Northern Paiutes of what is now Nevada, Winnemucca was the granddaughter of a Paiute chief and felt responsible for her Tribe’s welfare when the US government illegally confiscated her people’s homelands and forcibly resettled them on less hospitable lands far away. Educated at an English school in California, Winnemucca became a spokesperson and champion for her displaced Tribe, traveling to Washington DC to speak with the Secretary of the Interior and even the President about her people’s plight and the government’s broken treaties and promises. Her account of her experiences calls into question the universality of the reigning conventional notions of home and reveals the effects of settler colonial imposition and power on Indigenous peoples. For more information, look at her biography on the Nevada Women’s History Project and Early Native American Writers.

Cult of True Womanhood: In 1966, historian Barbara Welter described what she called “the cult of domesticity” or “cult of true womanhood,” a set of ideas purveyed by sermons, how-to books and women’s magazines for middle and upper-class white Protestant New-Englanders, in response to a range of social developments: the disappearance of the family farm, where everyone worked together; new professions located outside the home; and the flood of immigrants crowding cities and even small towns. This new vision of femininity reflected what scholars identified as an ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women, based on biologically determined gender roles and part of a complex system of “sex-gender conventions” that prevailed in the northeast US in the 19th century, and rested on four central “virtues:” piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness. At the same time, in legal terms, when a woman married, she moved from the legal category of feme sole (single woman) to the legal category of feme coverte (covered or protected woman), where her identity merged with that of her husband and she, essentially, had no rights apart from his protection. Reform of these laws in the form of the Married Women’s Property Acts began in the mid-nineteenth century but was not fully accomplished nation-wide until the early twentieth-century. Recently, historians have challenged and amplified Welter’s definition, identifying  four evolving and overlapping images of women in the nineteenth century: not only True Womanhood, but Real Womanhood, Public Womanhood and New Womanhood.

Additional terms you and your students may want to investigate:

architecture, art nouveau/arts and crafts movement, capitalism, childrearing/ girlhood and boyhood in 19th century, class/economics, Civil War, Colonialism, garden culture, gothic, home, immigration (19th century), imperialism, Indigenous history (19th century), industrialization, letter writing, materialism, photography, poetry. pseudonym, religions (19th century), slavery and race relations, sentimentalism, verse drama, women writers, women’s labor