. A Gendered Analysis of Victorian Women s narrative in Virginia Woolf s The Angel in the House

Beginning from the idea that the nineteenth-century British novel is a type of fiction that includes as two of its fundamental elements fictionality and the creation of a narrator that tells the story that is narrated, our contribution analyses the growth of Victorian women s fiction as the output of a number of women authors conscious of their feminine character and who are interested with investigating the female universe in their literary output, presenting the reader with an illustration of the difference that highlights the cultural construction of women in the nineteenth century. To the major metaphor of the woman as “the angel in the house” as described by Virginia Woolf, we defy the “new woman” and the movement towards women’s liberty, and a new standard of femininity which resulted in a description of the difference (the female virility), which permits an overview of meaningful representatives of the genre: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Bennet, Emily Brontë, Ellen Wood, and Mary Wollstonecraft. These are embodiments of a facing of the moral code and controlling behaviour in force throughout the nineteenth century in England, it is historical proof of the individuality and personal capability of a collective marginalized by the prevalent status and relegated to the margins of history.