The Half Sisters

Bianca Pazzi, illegitimate daughter of an Italian mother and English father, contends with poverty and prejudice to attain eminence and respectability in that most unrespectable of Victorian professions, acting. Her legitimate half-sister, Alice, finds herself unhappily married, trapped in the dreary and philistine existence endured by numerous middle-class wives of her time. Each has to confront the implications of passion in a woman's life, with results that challenge contemporary orthodoxy. Geraldine Jewsbury, who herself established a successful career as a novelist, journalist, and publisher's reader, grapples here with the nineteenth century's perennial 'woman question' and deals extensively with the damaging effects of conventional Victorian beliefs about women. Admired in its own day, The Half Sisters is now available in its first critical edition. 

Author: Geraldine Jewsbury

Publisher: Oxford/p>

Released Date: 1994

ISBN: 0192831143