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THE VICTORIAN NOVEL OF ADULTHOOD
Series in Victorian Studies
Joseph McLaughlin, series editor
Katherine D. Harris, Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, 1823–1835
Rebecca Rainof, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity
The Victorian Novel of Adulthood
PLOT AND PURGATORY IN FICTIONS OF MATURITY
Rebecca Rainof
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS • ATHENS, OHIO
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2015 by Ohio University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rainof, Rebecca Elise, 1979–
The Victorian novel of adulthood : plot and purgatory in fictions of maturity / Rebecca Rainof.
pages cm. — (Series in Victorian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-2178-9 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4538-9 (pdf)
1. Adulthood in literature. 2. Middle age in literature. 3. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
PR878.A375R35 2015
823'.809354—dc23
2015022080
ISBN 978-0-8214-4538-9 (e-book)
This book is dedicated to my family with love.
Contents
Newman, Mature Conversion, and the Poetics of Purgatory
Arrested Development and the Progress of Shades
Odd Women and Eccentric Plotting
Maturity, Modernism, and Woolf’s Victorian Retrospection
Illustrations
FIGURE 2.1. “La Pia of Siena,” Canto V, Le Purgatoire, Gustave Doré, 1868
FIGURE 2.2. “The Earthly Garden of Bliss,” Canto XXVIII, Le Purgatoire, Gustave Doré, 1868
FIGURE 2.3. “The Late-Repenters,” Canto IV, Le Purgatoire, Gustave Doré, 1868
FIGURE 2.4. La Pia de’ Tolomei, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868–80
Acknowledgments
I am delighted to thank the many people who fostered this book’s maturation. I thank Deborah Nord and Maria DiBattista of Princeton University for their generous insight and inspiring kindness. They helped support this book and its author at every turn. This book also benefitted from the kind comments and guidance of Susan Stewart, Jeff Nunokawa, Uli Knoepflmacher, Bill Gleason, Diana Fuss, Esther Schor, and many other members of the Princeton Department of English over the years.
To my colleagues at the Catholic University of America I owe special thanks. Ernest Suarez, Taryn Okuma, Daniel Gibbons, Tobias Gregory, Christopher Wheatley, Steven Wright, Pamela Ward, Joseph Sendry, Gregory Baker, Lilla Kopar, and the whole English Department—thank you for helping this book grow and for sharing your wit and wonderful company. I
