Janice Carlisle is Professor of English at Yale University and has published on a wide variety of Victorian subjects, including essays on the autobiographical novels of Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, as well as books on the ethical implications of Victorian fiction. More recently she has written on the culture of Britain in the 1860s, and has published Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (2004), a book on the sensory registers of novels written at that time.