Maude by Christina Rossetti, "On Sisterhoods" and A Woman's Thoughts About Women By Dinah Mulock Craik

"Maude" was written when Christina Rossetti was 19. Clearly autobiographical, the novel examines the heroine's struggle to resist the notion that modesty, virtue and domesticity constitute the duties of women. Rossetti, often overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, struggled to express her own independent authorial voice and to resist a life bound by the constraints and demands of the traditional feminine role. "On Sisterhoods" confronts head-on the woman question. Asserting that women's role is to find beauty in their lives through altruism and good works - to be, more or less, "good women", Craik provides a radical solution to "the woman question" by advocating the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods; effectively women's co-operatives.