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The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: ´Kitchen Literature´ explores why Victorian sensation fiction was derided as literature fit only for maids and cooks and how the depictions of fictional female domestics, from Jane Eyre to Neo-Victorian novels, reflect contemporary social concerns about the blurring of the boundaries of class and gender.

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Introduction: ´Kitchen Literature´ 1. ´Let nothing ever induce you to read novels´: Servants and Sensationalism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century 2. ´Merely telling the truth´: Servants´ Stories in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights 3 ´No human being ever was created for this´: The Servant Victim in the Works of Wilkie Collins 4 ´Privileged spies´: The Criminal Servant in Lady Audley´s Secret 5 ´She had her rôle to play´: East Lynne and the Servant Actress 6 ´We will still be husband and wife´: The Servant as Spouse in Gaskell´s The Grey Woman 7 ´The stuff of lurid fiction´: Sensation Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Notes Bibliography Index

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Elizabeth Steere currently teaches in the English department at the University of West Georgia, USA. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia and has published articles focusing on class and gender issues in nineteenth-century British literature.

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