Dickens and the Daughter of the House

The daughter in Dickens' fiction is considered in this study not as an emblem of tranquil domesticity and the hearth-fire, but as a bearer of cultural values--and as a potentially disruptive force. As the good daughters in his novels (Little Nell, Agnes Wickfield, Esther Summerson, Amy Dorrit) must leave the father's house and enter the wider world so they transform and rewrite the stories they are empowered to tell. The daughter's secret inheritance, her 'portion', gives Dickens a way of reading and writing his own culture differently.Schor, Hilary M. is the author of 'Dickens and the Daughter of the House', published 2007 under ISBN 9780521042635 and ISBN 0521042631.