In this study I conduct an exploratory corpus-based study of nineteenth-century
advice manuals for women with a view to investigating the ways in which these texts
ideologically and discursively construct a model of socially acceptable female identity.
The analysis is based on a corpus of twenty advice manuals published in Britain
between 1810 and 1878. By combining a quantitative analysis of keywords with manual
investigation of concordance lines containing the most frequent keywords, I examine the
parameters within which the model of socially acceptable female identity is discursively
constructed. My analysis shows that, by learning to control their bodies, voices and
speech, nineteenth-century women readers internalised the model presented in advice
literature in order to become desirable to men of a good social position (Armstrong 2014).
