Professor Pauline Nestor
- BA (Hons) (Melb), M.Phil (Oxford), D.Phil (Oxford)
- Professor
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Pauline Nestor was educated in Australia and England. After a BA (Hons) at Melbourne University, she attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and completed her Masters and Doctorate degrees in nineteenth-century English literature and culture. Her books include George Eliot (Palgrave, 2002), Charlotte Bronte (Women Writers) (Macmillan, 1987), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) and Female Friendships and Communities (Clarendon, 1985). She is also the editor of the Penguin Classics Wuthering Heights (2003) and the New Casebooks Villette (Macmillan, 1992).
Research Interests
I have written extensively on nineteenth-century English women writers, especially George Eliot, the Brontes and Elizabeth Gaskell. My research is informed by feminist and psychoanalytic theory and all my work analyses literary texts within the context of the rich cultural life of Victorian England. In particular, I have explored the new possibilities for women’s friendship and travel in mid-nineteenth century England and, more recently, the ethical dimension of George Eliot’s fiction. I have been invited to present aspects of my research at conferences in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and I have participated at interdisciplinary symposia on literature and ethics at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney and Indiana University.
I am currently working on a project (supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) which combines literary analysis with cultural history to provide a new perspective on the development of the nineteenth-century novel and modern notions of subjectivity. My research examines women novelists’ contribution to the development of the modern idea of self against a historical context in which both scientific advances in representation (photography, mirrors, optical devices, etc) and changes to the material culture (such as the democratization of print and the introduction of the Penny Post) led to an obsession with representing the self. Simultaneously, contemporary debates on psychology, feminism, abolitionism and self-help crucially informed conceptions of female autonomy and identity – all combining to produce a wholly new set of possibilities for female self-representation.
Selected Publications
George Eliot (Critical Issues) examines Eliot’s literary exploration of ethics, especially in relation to the negotiation of difference. It argues that, through a reading of their sophisticated drama of otherness, Eliot’s novels can be seen as freshly relevant to contemporary theoretical debates in feminism, moral philosophy, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis.
Charlotte Bronte (Women Writers) examines the ways in which Bronte’s life and work were characterized by division and ambivalence and argues that Bronte’s work provided a crucial alternative to the socially-orientated conservative ethic of the prevailing middle-class novel.
The Introduction discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Bronte’s influences and background. It provides a reading of the novel which argues that, however much Wuthering Heights may seem to hold out the satisfactions of a great love story, in more complex and more interesting ways it actually interrogates, rather than exemplifies, the romantic cliché of perfect love.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre examines three major concerns of feminist analysis - motherhood, sexuality and identity - and explores the novel’s deep ambivalence in each area. It challenges first-wave feminist readings of the text as a novel of progress and reveals ways in which the work can be seen as profoundly regressive; a fantasy of completeness and power which may be read in terms of a retreat to the psychoanalytic Imaginary