Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed?

The novels began exploring the world of women – their emotions and identities, their experiences and problems.

(i)Many novels were about domestic life – a theme about which women were allowed to speak with authority. They drew upon their experience, wrote about family life and earned public recognition.

(ii)The novels of Jane Austen give us a glimpse of the world of women in genteel rural society in early-nineteenth-century Britain.But women novelists did not simply popularise the domestic role of women.

(iii)Often their novels dealt with women who broke established norms of society before adjusting to them.  In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, young Jane is shown as independent and assertive.

(iv)In some languages, the early creations of women were poems, essays or autobiographical pieces. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women in south India also began writing novels and short stories.

(v)A reason for the popularity of novels among women was that it allowed for a new conception of womanhood.