Domesticity and Women’s Confession in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Ellen Middleton, The Saint’s Tragedy, and Villette

This thesis is an examination of the role that auricular confession played in the relationships between gender, religion, and domestic life in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. It focuses in particular on three texts, Georgiana Fullerton's Ellen Middleton, Charles Kingsley's The Saint's Tragedy, and Charlotte Brontë's Villette, and examines the consequences of women's auricular confessions in each of these works.