The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf (review)

The thesis of Valerie Sanders's book—that sibling relations are a cornerstone of nineteenth-century familial, social, and ideological life and hence provide "an undeservedly neglected guide to understanding the complexity of gender relations at that time" (2)—seems to me to be both correct and important (sometimes theses are true but insignificant). To support her thesis, Sanders draws from a broad range of literary and autobiographical texts and demonstrates a strong command of the primary literature. In her introduction, Sanders provides us with the literary-historical genesis of the brother-sister bond, starting with a brief but pertinent glance at Antigone, moving through the Romantics (and gesturing at G. W. F. Hegel's influence on them), and on to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sanders argues that the middle classes' unprecedented emphasis on the brother-sister bond in the nineteenth century stemmed from the development of the nuclear family as we now know it and the resultant increased intimacy between siblings. "With a full set of playmates at home," Sanders observes, "there was no real need to go looking for friends beyond the garden gate" (4). Later, Sanders notes that "most of the best- (and least-) known nineteenth-century women novelists were also sisters, whose first emotional tie to anyone other than a parent had been to a brother" (79). Somewhere in here, Sanders would have done well to justify more explicitly her emphasis on the brother-sister attachment to the exclusion of same-sex sibling ties. At the very least, it seems as though the concern about, if not obsession with, the sister-sister bond during this period is noteworthy and warrants some acknowledgment. The book isolates the nineteenth-century brother-sister relationship in a rather arbitrary manner.

The first three chapters focus on actual biographical siblings, while the next four center on literary representations, though Sanders brings a considerable amount of biographical material to bear on her later discussions as well. In her first chapter, "The Brother-Sister Culture," Sanders explains that she intends to "concentrate on several Victorian middle-class families which best exemplified the development of sibling culture" (12)—the Newmans, Bensons, Stephens, and Farjeons. Two pages later, however, she admits, "All these families were, of course, more or less eccentric, which perhaps makes them unrepresentative of Victorian family life in general" (14). She does not explain why potentially unrepresentative families would best exemplify the general case, except to say that "all the famous nineteenth-century families had their peculiarities" and that "most were equally conscious of having particularly close sibling ties" (14). This seems to indicate that, despite the eccentricities of these famous families, they have in common with the less famous the development of what Sanders calls "a sibling culture" (12). In order to clarify this key concept—sibling culture—she turns to the twenty siblings that comprise the second generation of these four families and analyzes them in terms of eighteen categories such as "closeness of brother to sister," "mental breakdowns," "converted to Catholicism," "married or did not marry." Yet none of these categories is common to all siblings, and only one ("lacked contact with children of other families") applies to most of them (twelve of the twenty). Clearly, this category is not a necessary condition of a "sibling culture," and I cannot tell if it is meant to be a sufficient condition. I was unable to deduce from these categories exactly what constitutes a "sibling culture."

Similar puzzles crop up throughout the book. Sanders uses figures associated with the Romantic period—William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb—to make a point about "post-Romanticism" (15) and novels from the twentieth century as exemplary of the nineteenth-century novel. She cannot seem to decide if, as a result of World War I, "tight-knit sibling groups were shattered...