women not to expect or demand luxury; their role is to love, cherish, and obey. Ellis's marriage manual is even more direct, although in her very directness is contained a double vision of women's fundamental experience, which is to be marked by virtue, humility, and insignificance on one hand and wit and charm on the other:
[Y]ou had better make up your mind at once to be uninteresting as long as you live, to all except the companion of your home. . . . [Y]ou may have more talent, with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired, but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
It is unclear whether or how many middle-class spinsters chose to remain so after reading this book. But women were hearing voices from various directions even in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Pope emphasizes the cult of morality with which nineteenth-century middle class women were identified and points to technical innovations of the industrial revolution that freed women
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