The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides [citate]

17%

He remembered exactly where he'd been standing and how Madeleine had stooped forwards, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as the sheet slipped and, for a few exhilarating moments, her pale, quiet, Episcopalian breast exposed itself to his sight.
She quickly covered herself, glancing up and smiling, possibly with embarrassment.

Later on, after their relationship became the intimate, unsatisfying thing it became, Madeleine always disputed Mitchell's memory of that night. She insisted that she hadn't worn a toga to the party and that even if she had - and she wasn't saying that she had - it had never slipped off. Neither on that night, nor on any of the thousand nights since, had he ever seen her naked breast.
Mitchell replied that he'd seen it that once and was very sorry it hadn't happened again.

43%

The thing about Victorians, Madeleine was learning, was that they were a lot less Victorian than you thought. Frances Power Cobbe had lived openly with another woman, referring to her as her 'wife'. In 1868, Cobbe had published an article in Fraser's Magazine entitled 'Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors. Is the Classification Sound?'. Women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain. They were restricted from participating in politics. And it was under these conditions, while they were classified literally among idiots, that Madeleine's favorite women writers had written their books.

Seen this way, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature, especially that written by women, was anything but old hat. Against tremendous odds, without anyone giving them the right to take up the pen or a proper education, women such as Anne Finch, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, and Emily Dickinson had taken up the pen anyway, not only joining in the grand literary project but, it you could believe Gilbert and Gubar, creating a new literature at the same time, playing a man's game while subverting it.

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