Mary Louise Poovey[1] is an American cultural historian and literary critic whose work focuses on the Victorian Era.
Her book is based around the idea of a "Proper Lady" and she looks at the difficulties that these three important authors had in breaking free from this mould.
She concluded that the only reason to re-read works like this was to confirm that the books that we had chosen to remember, like Jane Eyre and Mary Barton, are the best of their type.
Tamara Wagner went on to argue that this shows that we need to debunk our "history of reading these texts back from reality"?
[5] On January 30, 2015 Poovey received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.