Critical interest in women's fiction has grown enormously in recent years, in particular focusing on the ways in which female novelists have, in their creative work, challenged or scrutinized contemporary assumptions about their own sex. Victorian Women's Fiction: Marriage, Freedom and the Individual develops this area of exploration, showing how mid-nineteenth-century women writers confront the conflict between the pressures of matrimonial ideologies and the often more attractive alternative of single or professional life. In arguing that the tensions and dualities of their work represent the honest confrontation of their own ambivalence rather than attempted conformity to convention, it calls for a fresh look at patterns of imaginative representation in Victorian women's literature. - Jacket flap.