I am writing an article on female beauty in Bleak House, concentrating on the figure of Ada Clare, the beautiful blonde, and her close friendship with the protagonist and first-person narrator Esther.
Esther Summerson is Charles Dickens's one and only female first-person narrator. Though Dickens was not a feminist, he was quite progressive in relation to women. Unlike many of his contemporaries Dickens understood, for example, that the causes of prostitution were poverty and the sexual double standard, not an inherent vice in the women themselves. He was among the first to appreciate that many individual problems have social, not personal, causes, and among the first to speak about structural violence -- that is, the (indirect) violence of institutions.
Moreover, Dickens was progressive in that he appreciated eroticism in women in an era which wanted the "normal", "healthy" woman to be passionless and asexual.
The whole of Dickens's letters are available free at Project Gutenberg.
Have a good evening and take care! xxx
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