The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their works employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance and lesbian fiction. Volume 4 includes ‘Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892)’.

The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their works employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance and lesbian fiction. Volume 1 includes a general introduction ‘ The Wife’ and ‘Janet Doncaster’.

The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their works employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance and lesbian fiction.

The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their works employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance and lesbian fiction. Volume 2 includes ‘Rose Turquand' (1876).

The writers of these novels were involved in various types of activism, using approaches ranging from conservative amelioration to radical militancy. Their works employ a broad variety of genres from the novel of manners, sensation, education and vocation, to allegory, romance and lesbian fiction. Volume 3 includes ‘At Sundry Times and in Divers Manners’(1891).

Caroline Norton’s forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season. Her encounters with both a worthy and an undesirable suitor open an intriguing window onto the fashionable society of the 1820s in which Love in "the World" takes place. In placing her heroine in these predicaments Norton was able to draw upon her own experiences of the bon ton, as the time in which the novel is set coincides with her first ball in March 1826, when she burst upon the scene with all her beauty and brilliance, later recalling, “I came out [...] to find all London at my feet.” She believed that London could be as callous as the metropolitan social scene might prove treacherous, and in alerting the reader to the dangers of fashionable society she makes ample use of her own observations as a debutante at her first London season. In a highly readable and coherent narrative with an indeterminate ending, which throws a spotlight onto her life and times, the plot of Love in 'the World' initially follows a pattern broadly representative of her own experience before developing in unexpected and surprising ways.

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years, and are now widely studied. In this four-volume set her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage provides an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time.

"The Victorian period was a time of massive social change. Novels played a key part in this process. While today the women authors of these works are better known for their campaigns and non-fiction, the novels presented in this four-volume reset edition are key in fully understanding them as individuals, as well as the causes they were fighting for.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.