The subject matter of this impeccably researched, clearly written work is so compelling that the book will interest readers outside as well as inside the academy. The book will definitely influence how this reviewer teaches some of her favorite novels in the future. Essential.
Talia Schaffer is Professor of English at Queens College CUNY and the Graduate Center CUNY. She is the author of Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2011), and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (OUP 2001).