"Meriel, Lucy, Lavinia and May, the daughters of George, fourth Lord Lyttelton, were the nieces of the Prime Minister William Gladstone. Their letters and diaries make it possible for us to know them in extraordinary detail: at home at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire and in fashionable London society; at country houses and on tours of the Continent; in the schoolroom and embarking on courtship and marriage; in happiness and in adversity. Despite having eight very successful brothers, the girls emerge in their own right as strong characters. Victorian Girls is a remarkable portrait of a family. It is impossible not to feel personally involved in their lives."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This engrossing book explores family experiences of dying, death, grieving, and mourning in the years between 1830 and 1920. So many Victorian letters, diaries, and death memorials reveal a deep preoccupation with death which is both fascinating and enlightening. Pat Jalland has examined the correspondence, diaries, and death memorials of fifty-five families to show us deathbed scenes of the time, good and bad deaths, the roles of medicine and religion, children's deaths, funerals and cremations, widowhood, and mourning rituals.

This book presents an entirely fresh view of the upbringing of English children in upper and professional class families over three centuries. Drawing on direct testimony from contemporary diaries and letters, the book revises previous understandings of parenting and what it was like to grow up in the period between 1600 and 1914.Using advice literature which set out developing ideologies of childhood, gender and parenting, the book explores the separate but complementary roles of mothers and fathers in raising their children. Male upbringing is discussed in terms of schooling, female through the moral and social context of a domestic schoolroom dominated by a governess. Boys were trained for the world, girls for society and marriage. Rare teenage diaries surviving from the Georgian and Victorian periods show teenagers speaking for themselves about education; relationships with parents, siblings and friends; and their social, class and gender identity.

The race to the crown -- The birth of "pocket Hercules"--The lonely, naughty princess -- An impossible, strange madness -- "Awful scenes in the house"--Becoming queen: "I shall not fail" -- The coronation: "a dream out of the Arabian nights" -- Learning to rule -- A scandal in the palace -- Virago in love -- The bride: "I never, never spent such an evening" -- Only the husband, not the master -- The palace intruders -- King to all intents: "like a vulture into his prey" -- Perfect, awful, spotless prosperity -- Annus Mirabilis: the revolutionary year -- What Albert did: the Great Exhibition of 1851 -- The Crimea: 'This unsatisfactory war' -- London boils over -- Royal parents: "everything passes so quickly!" -- "Who will call me Victoria now?" -- "The whole house seems like Pompeii." -- Resuscitating the widow at Windsor -- The queen's stallion -- The faery queen awakes -- Enough to kill any man -- Two ironclads colliding: the queen and Mr. Gladstone -- The monarch in a bonnet -- The "poor munshi" -- The diamond empire -- The end of the Victorian Age - "The streets were indeed a strange sight

Louisa Mary, Lady Knightley of Fawnsley, was a woman of unusually wide interests, especially in the field of public affairs. In an age when few opportunities arose for women to make a contribution to political and feminist matters, Lady Knightley was an early pioneer of both causes. Denied the vote as a woman, she was a leading advocate of the campaign for constitutional, non-militant action to achieve the franchise, a cause which she continued to espouse until her death in 1913. Her later journals, written with warmth and humour, provide a fascinating picture of politics and society in England at a time of crucial change. Her journals provide many insights into rural politics following the Reform Acts of 1884 and 1885.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title In her third and final volume on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, Barbara Lounsberry reveals new insights about the courageous last years of the modernist writer’s life, from 1929 until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Woolf turned more to her diary—and to the diaries of others—for support in these years as she engaged in inner artistic wars, including the struggle with her most difficult work, The Waves, and as the threat of fascism in the world outside culminated in World War II. During this period, the war began to bleed into Woolf’s diary entries. Woolf writes about Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; copies down the headlines of the day; and captures how war changed her daily life. Alongside Woolf’s own entries, Lounsberry explores the diaries of 18 other writers as Woolf read them, including the diaries of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. Lounsberry shows how reading diaries was both respite from Woolf’s public writing and also an inspiration for it. Tellingly, shortly before her suicide Woolf had stopped reading them completely. The outer war and Woolf’s inner life collide in this dramatic conclusion to the trilogy that resoundingly demonstrates why Virginia Woolf has been called “the Shakespeare of the diary.” Lounsberry’s masterful study is essential reading for a complete understanding of this extraordinary writer and thinker and the development of modernist literature.

British social reformers Emma Cons (1838–1911) and Lucy Cavendish (1841–1924) broke new ground in their efforts to better the lot of the working poor in London: they hoped to transform these people’s lives through great art, music, high culture, and elite knowledge. Although they did not recognize it as such, their work was in many ways an affirmation and display of citizenship. This book uses Cons’s and Cavendish’s partnership and work as an illuminating point of departure for exploring the larger topic of women’s philanthropic campaigns in late Victorian and Edwardian society. Andrea Geddes Poole demonstrates that, beginning in the late 1860s, a shift was occurring from an emphasis on charity as a private, personal act of women’s virtuous duty to public philanthropy as evidence of citizenly, civic participation. She shows that, through philanthropic works, women were able to construct a separate public sphere through which they could speak directly to each other about how to affect matters of significant public policy – decades before women were finally granted the right to vote.