Subversive Heroines offers fresh insights into the Condition-of-England novels of the 1840s and 1850s that described the social problems caused by rapid industrialization. Working-class political agitation during this period caused many to fear that revolution was imminent. The novels offered an imaginative response to what was perceived as a pressing situation and in their conclusions provided suggestions for the resolution of class tensions.

A striking feature of the novels is the leading role women characters play in providing the solution to social problems. Their inventions contain a utopian dream of a woman-led society without classes and competition.

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Constance Harsh's book looks at seven such novels: Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and Mary Barton, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke, Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood. By carefully examining each narrative, she explores the means by which female characters gain public power and the millenarian implications of their activities.

She also demonstrates that not all socially conscious fiction at this time exhibited a similar optimism about the potential power of women.

Subversive Heroines departs from much recent work on the industrial novel in two important ways: it maintains its focus on the novels rather than on the nonfictional condition-of-England debate, and it emphasizes the consistency of the genre's approach to the contemporary crisis of class relations. Harsh's examination reveals a covert feminism in Victorian culture and illuminates fundamental gender struggles of the time.