This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940, historicallycontextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessingboth canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscapeof women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each ofits volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 2: 1860s and 1870s continues the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorianwomen’s writing distinctly within the 1860s and 1870s. Covering a range of fictional approaches,including short stories, religiously inflected novels, and comic writing the volume’s 16 original essaysconsider such developments as the sensation craze, the impact of new technologies, and the careeropportunities opening for women. Centrally, it reassesses key nineteenth-century female authors inthe context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helpedto shape the literary landscape of the 1860s and 1870s.

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women’s writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume’s 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 3: 1880s and 1890s analyses confluences and developments in women’s writing across two fin-de-siècle decades. Its 16 original essays reconsider fiction by canonical and lesser-known women writers, redefining the landscape of female authorship during these decades. By exploring women’s fiction within the social and cultural contexts of the 1880s and 1890s, the collection distils in terms of women’s writing how these decades discretely build on earlier work that is identifiably Victorian. The last two decades of the century, in distinctive ways, witnessed literary experiment, reflection on the limits of realism, and a fruitful sense of confusion about what was ending and what was about to begin.

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.

John Ruskin and the Victorian Woman Writer addresses the little-considered personal and literary relationships of John Ruskin and four major Victorian women writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti. Drawing on new archival, primary research, the book provides detailed biographical contexts for each of these relationships before considering the interplay of each woman’s writing with Ruskin’s. Focusing on literature, art, economics, and gender, it offers close readings of a selection of each woman’s oeuvre alongside Ruskin’s prose to demonstrate the affinities and the moments of disagreement between Ruskin and these writers. Though primarily aimed at an academic audience, the book will also be of interest to general readers with a developed interest in nineteenth-century culture. It advances readers’ understandings of the complex web of influence that existed between Ruskin and women writers in the 1850s and 1860s, establishing the opportunities that Ruskin’s art theory offered women writers engaged with social questions and the apparent influence of these writers on Ruskin’s own emerging political economy. By analysing women writers’ responses to Ruskin’s work—and his response to theirs—this book complicates and challenges assumptions about Ruskin’s supposedly troubled relationship with women.

Fictional novelists and other author characters have been a staple of novels and stories from the early nineteenth century onwards. What is it that attracts authors to representing their own kind in fiction? Author Fictions addresses this question from a theoretical and historical perspective. Narrative representations of literary authorship not only reflect the aesthetic convictions and social conditions of their actual authors or their time; they also take an active part in negotiating and shaping these conditions. The book unfolds the history of such ‘author fictions’ in European and North American texts since the early nineteenth century as a literary history of literary authorship, ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction. It combines rhetorical and sociological approaches to answer the question how literature makes authors. Identifying ‘author fictions’ as narratives that address the fragile material conditions of literary creation in the actual and symbolic economies of production, Ingo Berensmeyer explores how these texts elaborate and manipulate concepts and models of authorship. This book will be relevant to English, American and comparative literary studies and to anyone interested in the topic of literary authorship.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Taking up Virginia Woolf's fascination with Greek literature and culture, this book explores her engagement with the nineteenth-century phenomenon of British Hellenism and her transformation of that multifaceted socio-cultural and political reality into a particular textual aesthetic, which Theodore Koulouris defines as 'Greekness.' Woolf was a lifelong student of Greek, but from 1907 to1909 she kept notes on her Greek readings in the Greek Notebook, an obscure and largely unexamined manuscript that contains her analyses of a number of canonical Greek texts, including Plato's Symposium, Homer's Odyssey, and Euripides' Ion. Koulouris's examination of this manuscript uncovers crucial insights into the early development of Woolf's narrative styles and helps establish the link between Greekness and loss. Woolf's 'Greekness,' Koulouris argues, enabled her to navigate male and female appropriations of British Hellenism and provided her with a means of articulating loss, whether it be loss of a great Hellenic past, women's vocality, immediate family members, or human civilization during the formative decades of the twentieth century. In drawing attention to the centrality of Woolf's early Greek studies for the elegiac quality of her writing, Koulouris maps a new theoretical terrain that involves reassessing long-established views on Woolf and the Greeks.