Brenda Ayres is Associate Professor of English at Middle Georgia College in Cochran, Georgia. She earned her Ph.D. in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Southern Mississippi. Ayres is the author of Dissenting Women in Dickens' Novels: Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1998) and the editor of Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change (2002) and Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers (2003).