Resisting the Marriage Plot - Faith and Female Agency in Austen, Bronte, Gaskell, and Wollstonecraft

"Dalene Fisher offers a thoughtful challenge to a strain of feminist criticism that has seen Christianity as necessarily an oppressive force in early nineteenth-century women's lives. In lucid and accessible terms, she argues instead that it was their Christian faith that encouraged four famous female novelists to challenge the traditional marriage plot and women's role within it." -- Elisabeth Jay, professor emerita and senior research fellow, Oxford Brookes University
"By embedding her interpretation of these authors' works within the complexities of their Christian beliefs, Fisher not only provides insightful analysis of these novels but also draws our attention to an important reality that has often been ignored: Christian truth can be a powerful foundation for female agency." -- Christine A. Colon, professor of English at Wheaton College and author of Choosing Community: Action, Faith, and Joy in the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers
"A refreshing, intelligent, and unexpected study. Through a close reading of a diverse cluster of nineteenth-century women novelists, this book very effectively challenges the conventional idea that Christian faith simply reinforced the subjugation of women, and shows how it could in fact nourish and deepen resistance to a 'Miltonic' mythology of passive female perfection." -- Rowan Williams, University of South Wales, former archbishop of Canterbury