Dorothea's Daughter is a stunning new collection of short stories based on novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront , Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. They are postscripts, rather than sequels, entering into dialogues with the original narratives by developing suggestions in the text. The authors' conclusions are respected, with no changes made to the plot; instead, Barbara Hardy draws out loose threads in the original fabric to weave new material, imagining moments in the characters' future lives.

In this beautifully written study, Carolyn Lambert explores the ways in which Elizabeth Gaskell challenges the nineteenth-century cultural construct of the home as a domestic sanctuary offering protection from the external world. Gaskell’s fictional homes often fail to provide a place of safety: doors and windows are ambiguous openings through which death can enter, and are potent signifiers of entrapment as well as protective barriers. The underlying fragility of Gaskell’s concept of home is illustrated by her narratives of homelessness, a state she uses to represent psychological, social, and emotional separation. By drawing on novels, letters and non-fiction writings, Lambert shows how Gaskell’s detailed descriptions of domestic interiors allow for nuanced and unconventional interpretations of character and behaviour, and evince a complex understanding of the significance of home for the construction of identity, gender and sexuality. Lambert’s Gaskell is an outsider whose own dilemmas and conflicts are reflected in the intricate and multi-faceted portrayals of home in her fiction.

Investigates the idea of the human within Brontë sisters' work, offering new insight on their writing and cultural contexts.

"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) was a Victorian strongman who was colossally famous in his day and possessed what was deemed to be the most perfect male body. He rose from obscurity in Prussia to become a music-hall sensation in late Victorian London, going on to great success as a performer in North America and throughout the British Empire. He was a friend to King Edward VII and was appointed Professor of Physical Culture to King George V. His physical culture system was adopted by hundreds of thousands around the world. He lost his fortune at the time of the First World War and he ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery. There is lively interest in him on the web where his dumbells or chest-extenders sell for hundreds of pounds and an autographed photograph for thousands. Written with humour and insight into the popular culture of late Victorian England, Waller's book argues that Sandow deserves to be resurrected as a significant cultural figure whose life, like that of Oscar Wilde, tells us a great deal about sexuality and celebrity at the fin de siecle.