Murdoch to discuss Victorian era women

Lydia Murdoch
Credit: Penn State

As part of Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Humanities Graduate Program Lecture Series, Lydia Murdoch, professor of history and director of Victorian studies at Vassar College, will present “Angel in the House: Victorian Women: Memory and Forgetting” on Tuesday, April 10 at 7 p.m. in the Olmsted Building Gallery Lounge on campus.

Murdoch will discuss the feminine ideal of the “Angel in the House” and how Victorian women remained corseted and caged in crinolines, protected from the worlds of politics, business, and war within their domestic sphere. By investigating the lives of three nineteenth-century British women, the “doctress” Mary Seacole (1805-1881), the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), and the domestic servant Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909), Murdoch unravels the myths and contradictions of Victorian femininity and explores why the complexities of these and other women’s daily lives are all too often forgotten.  

Murdoch is the author of “Daily Life of Victorian Women” (2014) and “Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London” (2006).

For more information, contact Dr. Troy Thomas by calling 717-948-6194 or email [email protected].

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