Deerbrook itself was not illustrated. This discussion is illustrated by scenes from later Victorian novels. Click on the images for more information about them.
Frontispiece to Martineau's Autobiography.
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), already well known for her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832), published a three-volume novel, Deerbrook, in 1839. This was a new departure for her. Looking back, she saw various faults in it. "I should now require more of myself," she said, "I should require more simplicity, and a far more objective character, — not of delineation but of scheme"; she particularly regretted the interpolation of "laborious portions of meditation." Nevertheless, she recognised the work's value: it usefully expressed her ideas and feelings at the time, however "imperfect" these might have been; and, she added in passing, it overcame "a prejudice against the use of middle-class life in fiction" (Autobiography 415). Although her reputation at the time rested mainly on her sociological writings, the importance of this last point is widely accepted now, as, increasingly, is the novel's status as a "feminist text" (Roberts 75). Less fully appreciated is the acuity of her insight into human nature, without which the novel could scarcely have proved so influential.
The Central Relationships
Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, two sisters of marriageable age, lost their mother many years ago. After their father's death, and while their financial affairs are being dealt with, they leave their old home in Birmingham, along with their maid, Morris, to visit distant relatives. These are the Greys, the family of a coal, corn and timber merchant, in rural Deerbrook. The Greys have a sixteen-year-old daughter Sophia, a rambunctious thirteen-year-old son Sydney, ten-year-old twins, Fanny and Mary, and a much younger son, Ned. The younger girls are being tutored at home along with Matilda and George, the school-age children of Mr Grey's partner, Mr Rowland. These youngsters, especially Sophia, inject a good deal of life into the novel, particularly in the early chapters, and one of them, the "disagreeable" Matilda (145), has an important role as the focus of her mother's hopes. They contribute to the scheme of the novel in another way, too, through their lame governess, Maria Young, whose disability shadows the author's own deafness, and who often seems to be a mouthpiece for her own views. Many a lesson is learnt, by adult visitors as well as children, in a summerhouse on the boundary of the Greys' and Rowlands' grounds, which serves as their schoolroom. Margaret takes up German with Maria, and makes Hester rather jealous (jealousy is her besetting sin) by becoming a close friend of hers.
The Measure for the Wedding Ring, by M. F. Halliday.
Inevitably, there are some eligible males in the offing, and complicated courtships ensue. One of the men is the well-established and well-liked local doctor, Edward Hope, whose name suggests his character: "there was a gaiety of countenance and manner in him under which the very lamp seemed to burn brighter" (9). Hope is attracted to the less beautiful but (in some ways) less complicated of the sisters, Margaret. She is unaware of this, but, seeing her sister's reaction after he is thrown from his horse, realises that Hester has fallen in love with him. Hope recovers, understands from Mrs Grey, who has already "given Hester to Hope in her own mind" (71), that he is expected to marry the older sister, and does so from a sense of duty. Despite early problems of adjustment on both sides, and the other more practical problems that the couple face, the marriage turns out to be a happy one, and in due course their first child is born. By the end of the novel, Margaret's relationship with Mrs Rowland's brother, Philip Enderby, has recovered from its own setbacks, also caused by outside interference, in this case from Mrs Rowland, who feels the connection is beneath her sibling. Philip himself has improved under Margaret's influence. From being rather a superficial young man, he has become an earnest student of the law, a pursuit that has taken him away to London for much of the novel. As for the third young female here, Maria Young, she too had cherished a fondness for Philip before the accident that caused her lameness. From words she lets drop to Margaret, it is clear that she has sustained some heartache of her own, perhaps from this very attachment. But her selfless and cheerful encouragement to Margaret to join Philip in the garden at the end provides a sense of resolution to the narrative:
"And now, while there is any twilight left, go and give Mr Enderby the walk in the shrubbery that he galloped home for.”
Margaret kept Philip waiting while she lighted her friend’s lamp; and its gleam shone from the window of the summer-house for long, while, talking of Maria, the lovers paced the shrubbery, and let the twilight go. [523]
The Role of Deerbrook in the Novel
Life in the village of Deerbrook is not at all a rural idyll. The misunderstandings that have such an impact on the sisters' love relationships are due in large part to local life. Quite apart from these misunderstandings, professional problems arise for Hope when he decides not to vote for local dignitary Sir William Hunter's favourite in the county election, and the decision becomes public knowledge. The consequent resentment erodes his patients' good will towards him, and his practice suffers badly; Hester and Margaret come in for their share of disapproval too, and Hester minds it greatly. Worse, Mrs Rowland, envying his new relationship with the Greys, spreads malicious gossip about Hope in the small community: she puts it about that he has been grave-robbing for purposes of dissection, and generally falling short as a doctor. "Your wife has said these things," Hester protests later, to the more kindly disposed Mr Rowland, "and you know it; and you must make her contradict them all" (307). The confession comes, but it comes much too late. Animosity in the village flares up into mob violence against the Hopes, an attack on their house countenanced if not actually encouraged by Sir William himself, which is quelled only by Philip's canny tactic. Playing on the villagers' superstitious fears, he confronts them with a skeleton from Hope's waiting-room cabinet, which he illuminates from behind. That this tactic works (and makes even Sir William retreat) is hardly to the protestors' credit.
Mob violence in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, depicted by Fred Barnard.
As for the cholera epidemic of the later chapters, this cannot be blamed on village society, but its toll may be greater because of shared ignorance and superstition, and also because Hope's position in it has been badly undermined. Only when young Matilda Rowland has succumbed to the fever does her mother, in her desperation, turn from the rival Dr. Walcot to call in Hope. At last she admits her role in spreading baseless gossip. Not only that, she confesses that she burned a letter from Margaret to Philip, assuring him that she has never thought of anyone but him, and making it clear that she forgives him for his lack of trust in her. If safely delivered, this would have saved both of them great heartache. The generous-spirited Hope says to Mrs Rowland, "I forgive you, madam. I will do what I can to relieve your present affliction; and, as long as you attempt no further injustice towards my family, no words shall be spoken by any of us to remind you of what is past” (509). Still, despite his best efforts, Matilda is now beyond help. Her mother had dreamt of one day having a wedding for her (as she imagines, to Dr Walcot) that would eclipse Hester's. But this dream can never be realised — nor could it have been, because Dr Walcot has fallen in love with Sophie instead. Only Mrs Rowland, all her machinations thwarted, is excluded from the general happiness at the end.
Critical Approaches
Characterisation
The principal characters here, once dismissed by a nineteenth-century critic as "feeble and untrue" (Miller 112), on closer inspection prove to be neither. Martineau's exploration of them, along with her understanding of how external forces affect and are affected by them, repays the closest attention. It owes much to the association psychology of the philosopher David Hartley (Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 1749), as disseminated by the Unitarian minister, Joseph Priestly, who argued that human behaviour is not pre-determined, but can be changed for the better by sound moral influence. Martineau herself was a convinced Unitarian at this time, and this process takes place in most of the principal characters.
Hester, widely recognised as the more beautiful of the two, is no paragon. She easily resents her sister's attention to others and demands her own happiness as a right, but rises to the challenge when the financial cost of the villagers' ostracism of her husband starts to bite. Hope himself had recognised that she "has strength under her weakness," and had hoped from the start that there would be "peace in store for such generosity of spirit as lies under the jealousy, — for such devotedness, for such power." He recalls Margaret's encouraging words, "When it comes to acting, see how she will act!" (208). Both his trust, and Margaret's belief in her, prove to be justified. Mrs Grey feels that Hope himself plays a large part in this, crediting him with putting "some of his spirits into his wife" (378). As a marriage plot, Deerbrook is one that follows the principal couple well past the altar. It traces their difficulties in early marriage, their courage under economic hardship, and finally (despite a flare-up of Hester's old jealousy when Margaret seems to commandeer her baby), their emergence into contented family life.
Margaret is about to get married at the end, but her path has not been smooth either. For all her selflessness, and for her life-changing influence on Philip, she suffers her own torments. Indeed, she surprises several times with the intensity of the suffering, which even tempts her to wish for the ultimate release — to wish momentarily, for instance, that she had not been saved when she fell through the ice when skating, "I would fain have never come to life again," she admits (247). Later, too, when she feels Philip has not trusted her enough — has, in fact, believed that she once loved Hope, — she is deeply troubled. During a later water-party arranged by the Greys, one of the round of rival social events that mark the Deerbrook summer, she stands close to the river. In a scene which brings to mind Ophelia, and foreshadows Mrs Gaskell's Ruth (who is lured by a pool below a waterfall when deserted by her lover), she leans over to grasp an iris on the very brink: "she tried this way — she tried that; but the flower was just out of reach" (395). Providentially, young Sydney calls her away from what looks dangerously like temptation.
Florence Harrison's illustration for Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market.
The most vivid insight into Margaret's inner life comes in an outburst against Hester, when her habitual sisterly forbearance suddenly deserts her. “You leave me nothing,— nothing but yourself," she cries.
I have found a friend in Maria; and you poison my comfort in my friendship, and insult my friend. There is not an infant in a neighbour’s house but you become jealous of it the moment I take it in my arms. There is not a flower in your garden, not a book on my table, that you will let me love in peace. How ungenerous — while you have one to cherish and who cherishes you, that you will have me lonely! — that you quarrel with all who show regard to me! — that you refuse me the least solace, when my heart is breaking with its loneliness! O, it is cruel!” [248]
All her pent-up feelings fly out, and with such insight and vehemence that it is clear she has noted and minded Hester's treatment of her for a long, long time.
The less important characters are equally complex and convincing. For instance, despite all her kindness to the Ibbotson sisters, Mrs Grey meddles in their lives as dangerously as her neighbour does, first, as already seen, by assuming Hope's intentions towards Hester and making it almost impossible for him to pursue his interest in Margaret. But Mrs Grey's meddling continues even after the wedding, when she tries to use Hester to exert influence on Hope, upsetting Hester and stimulating her natural "propensity to self-torment" (432). Worse still is the way she intimates to Philip, after his engagement to Margaret is announced, not simply her later understanding of Hope's feelings about Margaret, but her entirely false belief that Margaret had reciprocated these feelings. Although not made with deliberate malice, this communication distresses Philip as much as Mrs Rowland's lies about his engagement had previously distressed Margaret.
For all his frequently mentioned "enthusiasm," and determined adherence to duty, Hope himself has his struggles. He severely doubts, at first, his choice of duty over passion, and is tested to the limits by Margaret's constant proximity: naturally, she has left the Greys to stay at her sister's house. In general, he responds to her brotherly affection with such careful restraint that his manner is noticeably subdued. But sometimes, as when she is rescued from the ice, he is caught off guard and his feelings for his sister-in-law reach the surface; and when she bursts out against Hester, he supports her rather than his wife. Learning at the water-party that Mrs Grey has told Philip of some prior connection between him and Margaret, he heaps coals of fire on his own head. Fortunately, Margaret herself is too sincere in her affections, and too preoccupied with thoughts of Philip, to perceive the cause of either his awkwardness or the occasional cracks in his reserve, although on this particular occasion she is puzzled by the way he blames himself. The fact that gossip can contain a grain of truth, even a significant contribution to the truth, has been duly noted by Martineau's critics (see Pond 175 ff.). But a few words with Philip later on enable Hope to shield Hester from any intimation of his early preference. Such complexities all give psychological depth to the principal characters.
Village Life
Along with its romantic interest, Deerbrook also has a number of melodramatic episodes. Mob violence against the Hopes is only one of these. A ruined abbey and terrific storm bring a nightmarish quality to the water-party. Then, one terrifying evening, during a spate of thieving that erupts after a blight, a man crudely disguised as a woman breaks into the Hopes' house and takes what he can from them — including Margaret's greatest treasure, the opal ring Philip had given her. In the last chapters, as noted above, cholera does its worst in their village because, in Hope's words, "the extreme poverty of most of the people, and their ignorance, ... renders them unfit to take any rational care of themselves" (462; emphasis added). He is proved all too correct when quacks and fortune-tellers descend on the villagers with their useless and indeed deadly "cures," and spirits are said to waft a ghostly coffin through the village at night.
It is easier to imagine such episodes coming from Dickens than either Jane Austen or George Eliot. They might be dismissed as Gothic elements, incorporated to spice up the narrative in the manner of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel — and at the same time looking forward to the sensation fiction that flourished in the 1860s. On the other hand, they have something in common with the social realism of mid-Victorian art, calculated to shock the complacent middle-class viewer. They certainly suggest other ways of situating Deerbrook in the history of the novel, and indeed of nineteenth-century culture. More immediately, however, these episodes allow Martineau to probe deeply conflicted minds at their very crisis points, and reveal impulses not only to self-destructive behaviour but also to unconscionable actions towards others.
A scene of gossiping in Dickens's Dombey and Son, again by illustrator Fred Barnard.
The most insidious and personally-directed evil is that exercised by Mrs Rowland. Philip had warned Margaret long ago of the dangers of living "among a small number of people, who are always busy looking into one another's small concerns" (28), and his warning proves justified when his own sister and even her more kindly-disposed neighbour, Mrs Grey, meddle to such bad effect in both the sisters' relationships. One critic, Gavin Budge, argues that what lies behind it all is Martineau's reading of Hazlitt: Budge quotes from the latter's essay, "Observations on Mr Wordsworth's Poem The Excursion," in which he famously declares that "all country people hate each other." Pointing to Hazlitt's argument that "lack of mental stimulation in country life" can build up a certain "nervous irritability" in the individual, which spreads and eventually vents itself on some unlucky target, Budge finds the same principle operating in Martineau's novel, when "Deerbrook’s inhabitants groundlessly stigmatize Hope as a ghoulish anatomist who exhumes corpses to pursue his studies" (132). Hope himself blames Mrs Rowland's spite on "long habits of ill-will, of selfish pride, and of low pertinacity about small objects" (513; emphasis added), telling Hester,
She disliked you first for your connection with the Greys; and then she disliked me for my connection with you. She nourished up all her personal feelings into an opposition to us and our doings; and when she had done this, and found her own only brother going over to the enemy, as she regarded it, her dislike grew into a passion of hatred. Under the influence of this passion, she has been led on to say and to do more and more that would suit her purposes, till she has found herself sunk in an abyss of guilt. I really believe she was not fully aware of her situation, till her misery of to-day [over Matilda's illness] revealed it to her. [513-14]
Philip has already seen his sister's behaviour as arising from a "malady" (327). It is not hard to see this "malady" as stemming from and spreading back into village life. Accepting Hope's reasoning, and understanding the pettiness that had driven Mrs Rowland to such destructive behaviour, Margaret's response is, typically, to offer sympathy rather than recriminations: “Poor thing!” she says. “Is there nothing we can do to help her?” (514). Punishment comes, not from the injured parties, but, with Matilda's death, and indeed with the many other deaths from cholera in the village, from a higher justice.
The Reformist Impulse
At this terrible time, Margaret's errand of mercy to a labouring family, the Platts, broadens the scope of the novel by confirming the deprivations and degradation of their class. The father of the family sits slumped by an empty hearth, cursing her for breaking a fortune-teller's charm by putting the filthy cottage to rights, while his wife is prostrated and their son next to death. As Hope himself says, "The apathy of some, and the selfish terrors of others, are worse to witness than the disease itself” (476).
Deerbrook has long been seen as a "novel of community" (Colby 230). Focussing on its social aspect has encouraged a number of critics to link the novel to Martineau's later experiences at Ambleside in the Lake District, as well as to her earlier reading, for it was then that she put some of her own ideas about community life into practice. This suggests another (related) way of approaching the novel. A key critic here is John Warren, who describes the novel as being "about the correct relationship between individual, household and community: a heartland concept which was as dear to Martineau as it is crucial to an understanding of her work and life" (224). The mob that threatens Hope, echoing the Captain Swing riots by hard-pressed agricultural workers at the beginning of the decade, has already shown the fault-lines in such a relationship in Deerbrook, and the Platts' desperate situation confirms it.
Thomas Faed's painting, Worn Out (1868).
Another critic of interest here is Amanda Claybaugh, who notices how Martineau at this point "attempts a more comprehensive verisimilitude than anything Austen attempted," and shifts her focus "to the many laborers who live alongside the novel’s middle-class protagonists [and] are suffering from an unspecified economic distress, which has prompted some of them to turn to highway robbery and housebreaking and leaves all of them vulnerable to the epidemic that soon breaks out." This, says Claybaugh, moves "an Austen-like courtship plot ... to something much like one of Martineau’s own Illustrations [of Political Economy]. Claybaugh is not claiming that Deerbrook is a reformist novel. As she goes on to say,
[i]t offers no account of what might have caused the economic distress or of how the laborers’ sufferings might be alleviated. What Deerbrook does share with the Illustrations and what the nineteenth-century novel more generally shares with the writings of reform, is a commitment to expanding the domain of representation, to depicting persons and experiences that have hitherto been ignored or treated unseriously, such as poverty, drunkenness, and disease; prisons, factories, slums, and mad-houses; prostitutes, laborers, servants, and slaves. [6]
Without advocating any specific remedies, then, Deerbrook complements its insights into the psychology of individual characters with a scrutiny of the society in which they operate, and which operates on them. Underlying Martineau's thinking again is the idea that life needs to be changed for the better by sound moral influence, a belief that is not confined to "middle-class life," but extends to society as a whole.
Feminist Interest
George Housman Thomas's depiction of Lily Dale in Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset, Vol. 1, having turned her back on marriage.
Apart from the Ibbotson sisters and the rival neighbours, Mrs Rowland and Mrs Grey, two other characters in the novel are frequently discussed, and seen very much in relation to the larger community. One is the governess, Maria Young. Maria inevitably attracts the attention of those critics whose special interest is in either the novel's autobiographical elements or its contribution to gender debates (or, of course, both). Her thoughts about the single and the shared life, communicated to Margaret while they are awaiting the return of the newly-wed Hopes from their honeymoon in Oxford, might well have been among those "passages of laborious meditation" that Martineau was, in retrospect, uneasy about, as perhaps not being justified in terms of either plot or themes. They do seem to say more about the author herself than Maria. To Deirdre David, for example, Maria's self-communing "suggests some of the psychological conflict Martineau almost certainly experienced by virtue of the contending claims of her gender and her intellectual fame, and by virtue of the tension between that repressed, passionate, tearful female child and that confident adult who, through a narrative of discipline, became as famous and as productive as any male intellectual of her time" (84). But these passages are not at all out of place here, both in relation to Maria's role as governess, and the prospects and struggles of the intelligent Ibbotson sisters.
With regard to Maria, or the independently-minded single woman in general, David continues, "this figure enjoys the power of intellectual production and bears the powerlessness of agency in the discourse to which she contributes" (84). Indeed, Maria finds fulfilment in the schoolroom, and accepts her narrow sphere of operations with grace. Despite Mrs Rowland's insults, and the withdrawal of her children from her care (all in a bid to hurt Margaret), her position at the end is a relatively happy one. Martineau's attitude here is conservative. She admits that a single life has its disadvantages; it is lonely, and a woman's power to support herself is distinctly limited: "for an educated woman ... there is in all England no chance of subsistence but by teaching," Maria tells Margaret (448). She is also at the mercy of such parents as Mrs Rowland. But Martineau is at pains to demonstrate that married life has its own frustrations. Hester undergoes a difficult period of adjustment after her marriage, finding that there are areas of Hope's life, not just his professional life, but his very being, to which she has restricted access. After all, she realises, she "had not fully understood her husband, and ... there remained a region of his character into which she had not yet penetrated" (199). Ironically enough, it is to be hoped that she never does "fully understand" the basis of their relationship. However, she too adjusts to her circumstances, weans Hope's heart from her sister, and, especially with the birth of their child, settles down to a harmonious married life.
As with the social problems she has uncovered, Martineau does not go further. It is enough, for now, that she has provided what Alexis Easley describes as "an outsider’s perspective on issues of love and marriage." In doing so, Easley maintains, she allows "readers simultaneously to experience and question the social conditions that narrowly define women’s social and economic roles," encouraging them "to develop an objective, yet sympathetic, perspective on conventional domestic morality" (88). In all honesty, it is hard not to feel sorry for the unattached Maria at the end. But as Margaret goes out to the garden to meet Philip, Maria's light shines from her window, and her friends, for all their joy in being reunited, do not forget her. She may seem a solitary figure, but she has her place in the community, and it is an independent one, with the freedom that that brings. This conclusion alone, not perfect but positive, justifies the attention now being paid to Deerbrook by feminist critics, even if it carries little hint of a more radical agenda.
The Doctor-Hero
Luke Fildes's famous painting of 1891, The Doctor, prints of which hung in many a Victorian surgery.
The other important character is Hope himself, partly in his role as Hester's husband, and partly in his professional role. As a husband, he proves that romantic attachment, such as he had felt for Margaret, and unequivocally expressed in a letter to his younger brother Frank in India, is less important to a solid partnership than dutiful commitment. When extolling Margaret, he had mentioned to Frank that Hester would no doubt make a "devoted wife" (71) and so she proves to be — to him. And, in the process already noted here, his initial struggles are resolved as he responds to this devotion. Their relationship, not rooted in passion, but in his suppression of feeling for another, and a growing mutual esteem, is another element that distinguishes Deerbrook from the more conventional marriage narrative.
As a doctor, Hope is no less important to the scheme of the novel, and equally influential. His "is no ordinary case of a village apothecary," says Philip early on (27), and he opens the way for George Eliot's Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch, and other doctors of Victorian fiction, at a time when the practice of medicine was becoming more professional and more highly respected. Even Dr Walcot, who happily goes into partnership with Hope after the harrowing events of the epidemic, proves worthy of respect, and of Sophie's hand. Referring to a later doctor-hero, Allan Woodcourt in Dickens's Bleak House, Tabitha Sparks argues that bringing "the detachment exemplified by Physician" into the marriage plot has far-reaching consequences, working against its emotional trajectory (2). In this sense, as Sparks suggests, Martineau can be seen both as presenting a new kind of hero in domestic fiction, and as introducing an element that would eventually change its conventions.
For all Martineau's later reservations about Deerbrook, she was satisfied with it in respect of "delineation," and this indeed is it strong point. Her insight into the springs of human nature and the workings of society, her belief in the potential for improvement on both fronts, and her confidence in the happiness that would flow from that improvement, all make this a tremendously absorbing and rewarding work. She would go on to write her historical romance about the Haitian revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture (The Hour and the Man of 1841), works for children, like the school story The Crofton Boys (also 1841), and many other non-fiction works of a sociological nature. These were important in their own ways. But, looking just at Deerbrook, we can see why other Victorian novelists owned her influence on them, and why Vineta Colby was right in several respects to say, over fifty years ago now, "we can trace in Harriet Martineau the emergence of a new and powerful shaping influence in nineteenth-century fiction" (211).
Bibliography
Budge, Gavin. Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789-1852. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Colby, Vineta. Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princteon: Princeton University Press, 1974.
David, Deirdre. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Easley, Alexis. "Gendered Observations: Harriet Martineau and the Womann Question." Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, Ed. Nicola Diane Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 80-98.
Martineau, Harriet. Deerbrook. New York: Dial Press (Doubleday), 1984.
_____. Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, edited by Maria Weston Chapman. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877. Internet Archive, from a copy in the University of Massachusetts. Web. 10 October 2023.
Miller, F. Fenwick. Harriet Martineau. London: W.H. Allen, 1884. Internet Archive, from a copy in the Digital Library of India; JaiGyan. Web. 10 October 2023.
Pond, Kristen A. "Harriet Martineau’s Epistemology of Gossip." Nineteenth-Century Literature 69. 2 (September 2014): 175-207. [On this subject, see also Yates, below.]
Roberts, Caroline. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Sparks, Tabitha. The Doctor in the Victorian Farnham: Ashgate, 2009 (republished by Routledge in 2016).
Warren, John. “Harriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Deerbrook and Ambleside.” Journal of Victorian Culture 13.2 (2008): 223–246.
Yates, Jennifer. “A ‘Habit of Speculation’: Women, Gossip and Publicity in Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook. Women’s Writing 9.23 (2002): 369–378.
Created 30 October 2023