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  • Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture by Jill Rappoport
  • Kathy Alexis Psomiades (bio)
Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture, by Jill Rappoport; pp. viii + 260. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. £45.99, £19.99 paper, $70.00, $29.95 paper.

The central focus of this book is on women’s role as gift-givers, both in Victorian literary fiction and in Victorian social movements. Whereas theories of women’s circulation have [End Page 282] tended to focus on women as the objects of gift exchange, and some studies of Victorian femininity have seen self-sacrifice as a form of self-erasure, Giving Women is interested in the agency of women’s gift-giving. It seeks to show the ways in which Victorian women, fictional and actual, used gifts (both literal and metaphoric) to build networks and form communities, creating alternatives to economic exchange and the politics of rights in models of gift exchange and sacrificial social activity. For women, giving becomes “a subversive way to direct social networks and establish civic authority that otherwise remained beyond their reach” (6).

The book is divided into two parts. The first half looks primarily at fictional gift-giving as it is depicted in women’s literary writing (short stories, novels, and poetry), the second half at how women writers, literary and extra-literary, use the concepts of gift and sacrifice to frame actual communal social movements. The first chapter treats early nineteenth-century annuals, publications designed to be gifts. Here the material status of the annual as circulating object is supplemented by the thematizing of its gift status in the stories within it. Jill Rappoport reads both stories of the circulation of the annual and stories that posit women’s gift-giving more generally as a remedy for social problems like poverty and slavery. She then turns to Jane Eyre (1847), Aurora Leigh (1856), and Cranford (1851–53) to examine the ways in which fictional women use giving to produce alternative models of kinship and community. The second half of the book begins with a reading of “Goblin Market” (1862) in the context of the language of sacrifice and gift in writing about Anglican sisterhoods. This is followed by a rich chapter on the “Slum Sisters,” a women’s brigade of the Salvation Army who worked in the slums dressed like the people they served between 1884 and 1890. Their visiting work was thus constituted as a kind of egalitarian sisterhood, rather than the bourgeois lady’s bounty, although the meaning of this gift depended on their having had a status to sacrifice. A final chapter looks at New Women eugenicists, and the ways in which they constituted their reproductive choices as a gift to a larger community; an epilogue carries the focus on gift and sacrifice to the fundraising and political activism of suffrage movements, particularly the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).

The great strengths of this project are its archival work, its readings of key moments in literary texts, and its ability to show how broadly the language of gift and sacrifice underwrote women’s social movements in the nineteenth century. The chapters on the annual and the Salvation Army introduce readers to texts, writers, and visual images they might not otherwise have known. Familiar moments in novels and poems are transformed by attention to the dynamics of giving: Jane Eyre’s division and distribution of her inheritance become a new way of forging kinship ties that opposes both primogeniture and couverture; Rochester and Romney’s blindings transform them from privileged givers into men who can give and receive in more egalitarian ways. Lizzie’s silver penny looks different when its extra-economic associations are fully explored, and even Evadne’s suicide attempt in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) becomes an example of a sacrificial feminist reproductive politics. Throughout, Rappoport is attentive to both positive and negative aspects of the gift—the ways in which it can be used to foster egalitarian exchange, but also the ways in which it can function as a strategy that reinforces hierarchy in favor of the giver, or diffuses necessary political activity...

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