In summer 2025, Leila Phillips researched books from Winterbourne’s collection as part of a University internship.  Leila’s particular focus was the role of women in late-Victorian Children’s literature. In this blog, we delve into more of her fascinating research.

Over the past few weeks, I have had the exciting opportunity to investigate Winterbourne’s collection of ‘Golden Age’ Children’s Literature as an intern in the University of Birmingham’s Collaborative Research Internship programme. Inherently, children’s books guide the reader towards certain social behaviours and moral values.  Therefore, examining this collection thematically in terms of gender allowed me to gain a unique insight into how girls were being shaped to think and act. I focused on the ideologies presented by Victorian women novelists, uncovering both conformity and subversion, reflecting the wider contemporary debates around the contradictory expectations of women. I decided to concentrate on three books:  Vera’s Trust by Evelyn Everett Green, The Heroine of Brookleigh by Edith Kenyon and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.  All these books were presented to children as prizes, showing that they were considered suitable reading!

From growing female representation in the industrial workforce to Queen Victoria’s conflation of the private and public sphere as wife, mother, and monarch, the exclusive historical association of women with the home was under question in Victorian Britain.  However, in some early 19^th century novels the domestic ideal was cemented in the collective conscience. Females were expected to be confined to home and family life, where their purifying influence could create an emotional bulwark against the rude commercial world. In my research, this image of the woman as a moral example was a recurring motif, showing that despite the repression and sexual inequality it fostered, it remained a deeply entrenched concept that many – including women – actively supported.

Accordingly, in the lesser-known late-Victorian novels Vera’s Trust and The Heroine of Brookleigh, the respective protagonists Vera and Queenie are idealised as high-minded, benevolent, and pious heroines.  They spiritually redeem the wayward men in their lives, while caring for and educating their siblings as proxy mothers. They are deferential, forgiving, temperate, selfless: in short, the traditional ideal to which all girls should aspire – or should they?

In Vera’s Trust, this would seem to be true. The author, Evelyn Everett Green, frames Vera as a salvatory female figure, who returns to London after the death of her aunt, whom she has attended these past years, as mistress of the Carmichael household. She tames and tempers her undisciplined, boisterous younger siblings into proper social citizens with compassion and love, whilst all the while searching for the other beneficiary of her aunt’s large inheritance. The elusive recipient – her childhood friend, now known as Russell Graham – has languished in overexertion, isolation, and fear since Vera’s departure. Her ultimate role within the novel is a simple one: to find and redeem him with all the righteous qualities she exudes from her very first step in the door.

In contrast, in the character of Queenie in The Heroine of Brookleigh, Edith Kenyon upholds the norm to critique its underlying premises. As a girl, Queenie is so conditioned by traditional expectations that she downplays her own capabilities and potential. She inherently believes that she can never be clever or brave like a man; her purpose is simply to be ‘good’, following the example of Jesus and having a life only lived for others. Twenty years of mistreatment and slighting ensue, not least from Cyril, her adopted brother and love interest. 

Kenyon seems to be showing us that the imposition of a self-demeaning and repressive belief system on women boxes them into a limited social role, so that others utterly fail to see and appreciate them. Cyril’s ultimate, long-overdue recognition of Queenie, which is framed as her ‘happy ending’, is embittered by all that came before. Kenyon encourages her readership to reflect on whether the end justifies the means, whether all Queenie suffers at the hands of those to whom she gives everything is worth it if she ultimately redeems and marries Cyril.  Kenyon subtly uproots the very foundations of the traditional female place.

Both Queenie’s and Vera’s lives are defined by what they do for others.  Their prospective husbands – in concluding scenes of uncanny parallels in both books – praise this behaviour to a third party, as if channelling the worldly voice of patriarchal approval. Importantly, in the most conformist of these two novels, Vera’s Trust, this is done to a young girl, thereby conditioning future generations to aspire to the same established ideals that Vera incarnates.

We can compare these two books to a much better-known novel, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.  Although not intentionally written for children, the book was often read by children, and one of Winterbourne’s copies has a prize label from Erdington School for Girls.

Catherine Earnshaw does not naturally fall into a traditional role. She is free-spirited, impulsive and headstrong, combating the expectation of feminine docility, having been raised beyond the grasp of Victorian enculturation. Only in entering the upper-class world of the Lintons does her individuality thaw. Her self-alienation climaxes when she shuns her soulmate, Heathcliff, to marry the socially appropriate choice, Edgar Linton – a betrayal which is explicitly made out to cost Cathy her life.

In a symbolic second act, her daughter Catherine Linton rights her mother’s wrongs by not similarly throwing in her lot with the given reality. She emotionally defies Heathcliff’s bitterness and cruelty, later breaking Hareton out of the same system by educating him; thereby subverting the very power structures Heathcliff tried so desperately to maintain in his vengeance. Catherine’s openness and humanity towards Hareton dissolves the social boundaries that once kept Cathy and Heathcliff apart. As such, she incarnates the same redemptive force as Vera and Queenie, but to a more formidable and progressive degree. Admittedly, the traditional framework of marriage remains – within this society and its texts, there is no long-lasting female identity outside of it – but in contrast to the implicit marginalization which ensues for Vera and Queenie, Cathy holds the promise of an equal relationship with Hareton, proving that it doesn’t have to be oppressive and she doesn’t have to be a puppet of the system, vying for wider approval (even subconsciously). She is her own woman. I believe, for a young Victorian readership, swept up in a gendered debate, Wuthering Heights encourages girls to aspire to drive the wheels of progress.

Leila Phillips
University of Birmingham’s Collaborative Research Intern