Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. Volume 4 includes letters from 1856 to 1862.

This five-volume set brings together the surviving letters penned by Harriet Martineau, the nineteenth-century writer and women’s rights advocate. Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. This book is a unique and highly valuable resource for students of, and others interested in, the history of feminism.

Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. Volume 2 covers her letters from 1837–1845.

One of the foremost writers of her time, Harriet Martineau established her reputation by writing a hugely successful series of fictional tales on political economy whose wide readership included the young Queen Victoria. She went on to write fiction and nonfiction; books, articles and pamphlets; popular travel books and more insightful analyses. Martineau wrote in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, at a time when new disciplines and areas of knowledge were being established. Bringing together scholars of literature, history, economics and sociology, this volume demonstrates the scope of Martineau's writing and its importance to nineteenth-century politics and culture. Reflecting Martineau's prodigious achievements, the essays explore her influence on the emerging fields of sociology, history, education, science, economics, childhood, the status of women, disability studies, journalism, travel writing, life writing and letter writing. As a woman contesting Victorian patriarchal relations, Martineau was controversial in her own lifetime and has still not received the recognition that is due her. This wide-ranging collection confirms her place as one of the leading intellectuals, cultural theorists and commentators of the nineteenth century.

Throughout her fifty-year career, Harriet Martineau's prolific literary output was matched only by her exchanges with a range of high-profile British, American and European correspondents. This set focuses on the letters written by Martineau, contextualising the correspondence through annotation of the highest standard. Volume 5 contains letters from 1863-1876.

In her feminist polemic, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf famously wrote of the (comparatively recent) literary tradition of female writers: ‘we think back through our mothers if we are women.’ Woolf’s major literary mothers were those women novelists writing during the Victorian period and earlier. Virginia Woolf and the Lives, Works, and Afterlives of the Brontës examines all of Woolf’s writings on the Brontës, across a wide range of genres: juvenilia, novels, literary essays, feminist polemics, diaries and letters. This proves particularly fruitful as Woolf herself was both a creative artist and a literary critic. As a woman, she was ambivalent towards the Victorian world in which she spent her youth: emotionally she remained in thrall to it; but intellectually she developed the modernist novel. After Woolf ceased to write publicly about the Brontës, she continued to engage with them through the Hogarth Press, which she had founded in 1917 with her husband Leonard. She then chose to publish books on the Brontës whose approaches to them she supported. Newman approaches her subject in a Woolfian way: that is, she avoids dogmatism and aims to open up discussion of the lives, works and afterlives of the Brontës as mediated by Woolf, rather than closing it down to one particular interpretation.

Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by ten pathfinding women writers. “A wild portrayal of the passion and spirit of female walkers and the deep sense of ‘knowing’ that they found along the path.”—Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path “I opened this book and instantly found that I was part of a conversation I didn't want to leave. A dazzling, inspirational history.”—Helen Mort, author of No Map Could Show Them This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing—of being—articulated by these ten pathfinding women.

Charles Dickens called his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth his ‘best and truest friend’. Georgina saw Dickens as much more than a friend. They lived together for twenty-eight years, during which time their relationship constantly changed. The sister of his wife Catherine, the sharp and witty Georgina moved into the Dickens home aged fifteen. What began as a father–daughter relationship blossomed into a genuine rapport, but their easy relations were fractured when Dickens had a mid-life crisis and determined to rid himself of Catherine. Georgina’s refusal to leave Dickens and his desire for her to remain in his household led to rumours of an affair and even illegitimate children. He left her the equivalent of almost £1 million and all his personal papers in his will. Georgina’s commitment to Dickens was unwavering but it is far from clear what he did to deserve such loyalty. There were several occasions when he misused her in order to protect his public reputation. Why did Georgina betray her once much-loved sister? Why did she fall out with her family and risk her reputation in order to stay with Dickens? And why did the Dickenses’ daughter Katey say it was ‘the greatest mistake ever’ to invite a sister-in-law to live with a family?

The literary presence of Harriet Martineau pervades 19th-century English and American culture. This edition makes her work available, and focuses on her writings on imperialism. It should be of interest to scholars of colonialism, women's writing, Victorian studies, sociology and journalism.