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The only Southern white women ever to become leading abolitionists, Sarah and Angelina Grimke encountered many obstacles and leapt many hurdles in pursuing their anti-slavery work. Their greatest accomplishment was overcoming the ubiquitous prejudices of society in regard to women. Indeed, they were ...

The only Southern white women ever to become leading abolitionists, Sarah and Angelina Grimke encountered many obstacles and leapt many hurdles in pursuing their anti-slavery work. Their greatest accomplishment was overcoming the ubiquitous prejudices of society in regard to women. Indeed, they were the first women to take to the public platform and the first to assert women's rights. In The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina, Gerda Lerner, herself a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, tells the compelling history of these determined sisters and the inroads they made for women and blacks alike. From their wealthy upbringing in Charleston, South Carolina, the societal restraints that kept them from higher education, and their utter contempt of slavery, to their conversion to the Quaker religion, and monumental achievements at the podium and with the pen, Lerner illuminates the lasting contributions of the Grimke sisters, as well as the important role played by women in the anti-slavery movement.

While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to the Brontes' writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In "We Are Three Sisters, " Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families ...

While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to the Brontes' writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In "We Are Three Sisters, " Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontes' fiction of personal development, exploring the ways in which it recognizes the family as a defining community for selfhood.

Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontes' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology disseminated in conduct books and home guides that held the family to be the original nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, "We Are Three Sisters" shows that the Brontes' novels display a heightened awareness of the complexities of contemporary female experience and the,problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties.

Chapter one discusses the mid-Victorian "culture of the family, " in which the Brontes emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. Chapter two provides an introduction to the Brontes' early collaborative writings, in order to understand the sisters' shared interest in the family's formative role in the context of their own experience as a family of authors. It also shows the influences of Patrick and Branwell Bronte on the development of their sisters' writing.

Chapters three through seven explore the various constructionsof family in the sisters' novels. Of the numerous studies on the Brontes, comparatively few consider all seven novels together, and no previous study has undertaken to examine the Brontes' writing in the context of mid-Vict