who educates the natives in Africa but neglects her own family). Third, Some women in Dickens novels just get in the wayof men, that is. We see a few of these women in Hard Times. Possibly because she is too dull to utter an intelligible thought, Mrs. Grandgrind is made miserable by her husband; their daughter Louisa (not unlike Estella in Great Expectations) is deprived of any chance to enjoy love and sex with any man other than her brother. In the same novel Mrs. Sparsit is totally humiliated when she becomes too meddlesome in the affairs of men.. In general Dickens is impossible to read without seeing the relationships between the sexes, the oppression of women and the emotional and sexual dilemma of women in the mid-nineteenth century in industrial England. ...
