These two volumes list late-and mid-Victorian poets, with brief biographical information and bibliographical details of published works. The major strength of the works is the 'discovery' of very many minor poets and their work, unrecorded elsewhere.

Marianne Farningham has been called one of the most influential female members of the nineteenth-century Baptist community, yet her name, a familiar one in evangelical households during the later nineteenth century, is virtually unknown to us today. Marianne, who wrote for the Christian press over a period of fifty years, both reflected and shaped aspects of popular Nonconformity, through her poetry, prose and biographies. She covered topics as varied as the theology of hell and votes for women. This investigation explores major aspects of Marianne's many-faceted life and thought, and discusses her views of women's roles, her educational work, her public life, for example as a popular lecturer, and her spirituality. Informed by Marianne's life and writings, it challenges a number of stereotypes of Victorian evangelicalism, including assumptions about evangelical women and the relationship between Evangelicalism and feminism. It is a significant contribution to the history of Victorian Nonconformity.

In this study, Gray examines the broadly neglected body of Victorian women's religious verse, showing how women of the period used an array of inventive literary strategies to construct and wield provocative forms of authority. Their deployment of biblical source, trope and genre transfigured Christian and lyric traditions.