The author will identify the key features of Shelley’s idleness that embed her text and her traveller persona at the threshold between Romanticism and the Victorian age and anticipate High Victorian discourses on leisure.
The history of nineteenth-century women’s leisure has yet to be adequately explored. Essays in this special issue examine a selection of British women’s leisure activities and demonstrate that women sought leisure on any terms they could manage. Content: - Alexis Easley, “Scrapbooks and Women’s Leisure Reading Practices, 1825–60” - Kathryn Ledbetter, “Rinkualism, Punch, and Women on Wheels” - Robyn Miller, ““Resolute, Wild, Free”: Women’s Leisure and Avian Ecologies in Jane Eyre” - Liora Selinger, “The Work of Play and the Pleasures of Work in Mary Lamb’s Mrs. Leicester’s School” - Madeleine C. Seys, ““It’s All Woman’s Work from One End to Another”: Embroidering the Truth in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret”