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the period, Shakespeare.2 The phenomenon may be said to date from 1832, with the publication of Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. Jameson wrote magazine articles, biographies, travel narratives, and art guides in order to support her family. Her seminal work on Shakespeare was published about forty times until 1911 and was known to critics and popular readers alike. The title indicates that the book was conceived as being primarily “about” characteristics of women and only incidentally “about” Shakespeare’s heroines. Jameson herself, through the character “Alda’’ in the introductory dialogue, professes to use Shakespeare as a teaching device “‘to illustrate the various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results’” (Jameson 1854:xii). She prefers examples from Shakespeare rather than from history, for history is often not clear-cut, but Shakespeare’s characters “combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us” (xix). The inspiration for Jameson’s work, then, is not so much commentary on Shakespeare as it is a desire for the morally improving education of women.3

Jameson was not alone in her concern. Led by Victoria, who “said that her success as a queen depended in large part on the morality of her court and the harmony of her domestic life,” the Victorian period generated a number of instructional books for women (Springer 1977:125, 128–29). Among the most popular were those by Sarah Stickney Ellis. Her Women of England, which appeared in 1839, was the first of an often-reproduced series, including Daughters of…, Wives of…, and Mothers of England, which set about to improve “the majority of the female population of Great Britain” (Ellis 1839:11). Focusing on the large number of women in the new middle class, Ellis strives to promote in them a sense of their moral responsibility as “domestic women,” keepers of hearth and home. While Ellis does not deal specifically with Shakespeare, her emphasis on what constitutes Englishness finds its natural counterpart in the yoking of Shakespeare, considered that most English of authors, with the moral development of England’s women. Mary Cowden Clarke, one of the first female editors of Shakespeare’s works, wrote the immensely popular Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–52), as well as a series of articles published in The Ladies’ Companion for 1849–50 and 1854.4 In these articles and in a later piece written for The Girl’s Own Paper, Cowden Clark puts forth the view that woman should not only see herself as she is in Shakespeare’s heroines but also learn how to improve what she sees:

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