SOURCE: Fennell, Francis L., and Monica A. Fennell. “‘Ladies—Loaf Givers’: Food, Women, and Society in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.” In Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays, edited by Vanessa D. Dickerson, pp. 235-58. New York: Garland, 1995.

In the following essay, the critics explore the prescribed roles for women in Victorian society involving food preparation and food serving, and the ways in which Brontë and Eliot incorporated those roles into their fiction.

[Cooking] means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves, and savoury in meats. … [It] means much tasting, and no wasting; it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian...