The Lady on the Drawingroom Floor with Selected Poetry and Prose, by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, seeks to reclaim Coleridge’s reputation as a novelist, poet, critic, and educator by featuring familiar works alongside unpublished or out-of-print works. This collection includes a substantial introduction to Coleridge, analyzing her life and legacy; the whole of Coleridge’s final published novel; and a selection of important poems, short stories, essays, and letters. This discussion of her career invites the reader to consider her poetry and other writing alongside the novel that early critics called her most reflective and mature. In restoring the integrity of Coleridge’s literary canon, this volume offers new ways of understanding the complexities of an innovative Victorian writer who deserves to be better known and featured more prominently in anthologies and college courses. This collection is intended to introduce scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and the general reading public to Coleridge’s specific and considerable contributions to late-Victorian literature.

This collection explores how nineteenth and twentieth-century women writers incorporated the idea of ‘place’ into their writing. Whether writing from a specific location or focusing upon a particular geographical or imaginary place, women writers working between 1850 and 1950 valued ‘a space of their own’ in which to work. The period on which this collection focuses straddles two main areas of study, nineteenth century writing and early twentieth century/modernist writing, so it enables discussion of how ideas of space progressed alongside changes in styles of writing. It looks to the many ways women writers explored concepts of space and place and how they expressed these through their writings, for example how they interpreted both urban and rural landscapes and how they presented domestic spaces. A Space of Their Own will be of interest to those studying Victorian literature and modernist works as it covers a period of immense change for women’s rights in society. It is also not limited to just one type or definition of ‘space’. Therefore, it may also be of interest to academics outside of literature – for example, in gender studies, cultural geography, place writing and digital humanities.

The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp’s radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D’Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women’s writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.

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Annie S. Swan's magazine.