Womens Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culturesheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of womens work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze womens voices and works on the subject of womens rights and the representation of the New Woman.

Gloria Y.A. Ayee is lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University and faculty associate at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.



Dmitry Kurochkin is lecturer and researcher at Harvard University.



Elena V. Shabliy is visiting scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Chapter 1: Alice Meynells Negative Happiness: The Primacy of Emotion and the Nature of Art

Laura H. Clarke

Chapter 2: Struggles of the New Woman in the New World: The Life of the Nineteenth-Century Emancipated American Woman

Jacquelyn C. Wenneker

Chapter 3: One of a Sex so Weak: Oppressed Womanhood in Thomas HardysThe Mayor of Casterbridge

Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad

Chapter 4: I am, too, an Individual: The Making of the Professional Woman in Netta Syretts Writing (1890-1899)

Mariam Zarif

Chapter 5: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the George Sand of New Orleans

Angela R. Hooks

Chapter 6: TheWonderful Adventuresof the Motherly Yellow Woman: Mary Seacoles Emancipated Journeys and Public vs. Private Life

Camille S. Alexander

Chapter 7: Women within Precincts: Colonialism and Racialization inThe Madwoman in the Attic,Wide Sargasso Sea, andJane Eyre

Shilpa Daithota Bhat