Education
Brown University.
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book
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
( Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each ...)
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691128359/?tag=2022091-20
Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
( In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of...)
In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres. Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—the portière who supervised the apartment building.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520217268/?tag=2022091-20
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England by Sharon Marcus (2007-01-22)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NH04FYE/?tag=2022091-20
Sharon Marcus
Edit ProfileCareer
She specializes in nineteenth-century British and French literature and culture, and teaches courses on the 19th-century novel in England and France, particularly in relation to the history of urbanism and architecture. Gender and sexuality studies. Narrative theory; and 19th-century theater and performance.
She is one of the senior editors of Public Culture, as well as a founding editor and Fiction Review Editor of Public.
With Stephen Best, she recently edited a special issue of Representations on "The Way We Read Now." Before coming to Columbia in 2003, Marcus taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and her Doctor of Philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University Humanities Center.
Achievements
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Marcus has received Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, and a Gerry Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia. Marcus is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (University of California Press, 1999), which received an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature, and Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: 2007). Between Women has been translated into Spanish and won the Perkins Prize for best study of narrative, the Albion prize for best book on Britain after 1800, the Alan Bray Memorial award for best book in queer studies, a Lambda Literary award for best book in LGBT studies.
Works
book
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Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
( Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each ...)
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Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
( In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of...)
- Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England by Sharon Marcus (2007-01-22)
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Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
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Born
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Nationality
United States