The literary inheritance of paradise lost in the nineteenth-century domestic novel

Abstract

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century women novelists rework Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) within the domestic novel, particularly by reframing the Fall through the courtship plot. The central narrative conditions of the Fall—temptation, error, exile, and reconciliation—are not simply inherited or resisted but transformed within the social worlds of marriages, households, and provincial communities. In doing so, writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot reshape the Fall narrative into a lens for exploring ethical choice and relational conflict, making the domestic novel a vital vehicle for Milton’s nineteenth-century afterlife. For many nineteenth-century readers, Milton’s retelling of Genesis—with its psychological depth and rhetorical intensity—shapes the imaginative reception of the biblical Fall. Novelists adapt Miltonic motifs into new narrative forms: Austen refigures error as ironic misjudgement in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814); Brontë expands temptation into Gothic and communal ordeals in Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849); Eliot disperses the Fall across provincial causality in Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871–2), presenting error and partial reconciliation as conditions of ordinary life. Taken together, these novels domesticate Milton’s epic by resituating its theological drama within the intimate ethical concerns of everyday existence. The project situates its readings within broader currents of feminist literary criticism and debates on influence, engaging especially with scholarship on domestic fiction as a site where gender, power, and narrative authority are continually negotiated. By highlighting the transposition of Milton’s Paradise Lost into the domestic novel, the thesis demonstrates how epic motifs are repurposed to shape new genres and narrative practices. In this process, women writers transform Milton’s narrative arc, redirecting a dominant literary inheritance into the sphere of courtship, marriage, and everyday ethical life. The result is a distinct form of domestic theology, in which the cosmic drama of the Fall is reimagined through the intimate terms of the nineteenth-century novel.