I'll focus on literature in my response, and use three texts as case studies of the variation in literary views of women--this is not an overview of every portrayal of women in fiction, but should allow an interesting cross-section of perspectives.

First, there's Henry James' 1880-81 novel The Portrait of a Lady", which showcases a wide range of women in Europe and America. One of the novel's supporting characters is Henrietta Stackpole, a woman journalist who "was thoroughly launched in journalism, [...] her letters to the Interviewer, from Washington, Newport, the White Mountains and other places, were universally quoted". An independent and unmarried woman who has "travelled over the whole American continent", she offers an (atypical) example of the career which an American woman of the time might possess. A number of other women in the novel are aristocratic or wealthy wives or unmarried women, but many are far from obedient. Madame Merle, a much-admired woman in high society, is revealed towards the end of the novel to have had a child out of wedlock from a longstanding adulterous relationship, and to have been manipulating the novel's protagonist into marrying the father of her child (implied to be in order to please her lover and ensure that Merle's daughter has a mother).

Another case study is the poetry of Christina Rossetti, an adherent of the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian movement. Per Lynda Palazzo's book "Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology", Tractarianism “required the advent of a male saviour” (xii) and depicted women as being inherently less capable of imitating Christ, an idea which Rossetti grappled with through her poetry. "The Convent Threshold", for instance, depicts a woman repenting from a sinful life (implicitly, she has slept with a man out of wedlock) who implores her lover to also devote himself to religion, an image which might seem familiar to stereotypes about Victorians being religious and conservative. However, this is also arguably an image of feminine power: the woman in the poem reforms from her sin (with her lover being the one who is hesitant to repent). She continues to profess her love to him despite her newfound convictions: " How should I rest in Paradise,/Or sit on steps of Heaven alone?" she says, and the poem ends with her wish to reunite with her lover and "love with old familiar love"--but only once they are in Heaven, experiencing spiritual love instead of sinful sexuality. Of note is the fact that outside of her poetry, Rossetti volunteered at "Magdalene Asylums", houses for prostitutes and other "fallen women", a possible reason for why her work is often quite compassionate towards the plight of such women.

I'll also mention "Sultana's Dream", a by Begum Rokeya, a Muslim woman writing in British India. It was written in 1905, which is technically four years after Queen Victoria's reign ended, but is still an interesting text to mention here. While dreaming, its protagonist enters "Ladyland", a utopia where women are socially dominant and men are secluded. In the story, women are educated and have led scientific advancements like weather control, the workday has been reduced to two hours (because men waste most of their workday smoking), and gender stereotypes are reversed (for instance, a character claims that "Women's brains are somewhat quicker than men's").

Here are a few other primary texts that are relevant: Coventry Patmore's poem "The Angel in the House" (a popular work about the domestic role of women, which shaped or at least codified the stereotype of the obedient Victorian wife), Alfred Tennyson's Maud (about a man obsessively in love with a young woman, an interesting text to consider regarding the idea of woman as temptress or romantic object), Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest (a satire of contemporary marriage conventions) and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (an autobiographical story about her youth as a slave). Secondary texts to read could include Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman In The Attic (an older study of women in Victorian literature), and Jane Tompkins' Sensational Designs (about how American women's fiction in this era, far from being full of regressive stereotypes, was actually startlingly progressive for the time).