| Summary: | This dissertation demonstrates why it is important to recover works by conservative
Victorian women writers who, although not interested in the radicalism and subversion
associated with the drive towards suffrage, were none the less interested in promoting social
reform and constructing female agency within the social sphere. Specifically, it uses the life and
writings of Felicia M. F. Skene (1821-1899) as a lens through which to examine how charity
becomes a powerful tool for the conservative, religious woman writer to reform that
conservativism, in the process shaping new identities for women. By committing herself and her
characters’ lives to Christ’s example in the world (love, purity, justice, and self-sacrifice), Skene
reveals how it is possible to look outside the self to the social body, enacting change in society
and constructing a space for women’s action. In so doing, Skene promotes a moral vision of
society that stresses the importance of personal, one-to-one intervention between the individual
and society’s less fortunate members, and at the same time reconfigures conventional Victorian
philanthropic theory and practice. Skene’s moral vision for society, which works to level some of
the differences between its members, runs counter to dominant Victorian theories of social
reform that move away from such personal connection to a theory that is systematic and
bureaucratic; her writing continually returns to the efficacy of personal connection and the
inadequacy of state intervention. Using a model of friendship, then, Skene and her heroines
become “mother confessor” figures for the penitents and prisoners with whom they work.
Furthermore, the agency modelled in Skene’s work in turn becomes a model for her readers to
take into their lives. Writing about charitable concerns and philanthropic endeavours creates a
community of readers, uniting them emotionally and personally, and helps to bring about moral
transformation in the reader similar to that achieved both for the charitable recipient and for
society. Bringing Skene’s voice and writings into the twenty-first century, along with those of
other conservative religious women writers, provides new insight into the condition of women
and into the construction of society and social reform in the nineteenth century. === Arts, Faculty of === English, Department of === Graduate
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