Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure (Feminist Issues : Practice, Politics, Theory)

'Famous Last Words' traces a broad historical transition--from the 1840s to the 1980s--from the more rigid dichotomy of the Victorian novel, in which good women must marry and fallen women die, to the more open alternatives of twentieth-century fiction, which sometimes permit the independent female protagonist to survive and occasionally alternative constructions of gender as well as plot.