In this groundbreaking book, Barbara Leah Harman convincingly establishes a new category in Victorian fiction: the feminine political novel. By studying Victorian female protagonists who participate in the public universe conventionally occupied by men, she is able to reassess the public realm as the site of noble and meaningful action for women in Victorian England.

The letters in this second volume -expose a woman of powerful intellect, complex emotions, unshakeable convictions, and loving heart.- Rossetti, forty-three years old in 1874, is now an established poet with a strong literary reputation among her contemporaries. But, as Harrison points out in his introduction to the volume, -two thirds of her life was over, and its losses were mounting.- The marriage of William Michael, the death of her sister, Maria, Dante Gabriel's addiction to chloral and the illness that led to his death in 1882, and the deaths of close personal and family friends...

-When I consider the quantity of wise talking which has passed in at one long ear of the world, and out at the other, without making the smallest impression upon its mind, I am tempted for the rest of my life to try and do what seems to me rational, silently; and to speak no more.-

--Ruskin in Fors Clavigera (27:353)

Ruskin did, however, speak voluminously throughout the late nineteenth century in opposition to the abstract theoretical musings of the day. His Fors Clavigera--a collection of monthly letters published over thirteen years--offered his readers a model of critical...

Essays and Reviews is a collection of seven articles that appeared in 1860, sparking a Victorian culture war that lasted for at least a decade. With pieces written by such prominent Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals as Benjamin Jowett, Mark Pattison, Baden Powell, and Frederick Temple (later archbishop of Canterbury), the volume engaged the relations between religious faith and current topics of the day in education, the classics, theology, science, history, literature, biblical studies, hermeneutics, philology, politics, and philosophy. Upon publication, the church, the...

For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention&emdash;-the loyal wife, good mother, and respected writer&emdash;-a reputation that led to her steady decline in the view of twentieth-century literary critics. Recent scholars, however, have begun to recognize that Mrs. Gaskell's high standing in Victorian society allowed her to effect change in conventional ideology. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund focus this reevaluation on issues pertaining to the Victorian literary marketplace.

Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays...

Queens, by definition, embody a historical contradiction between femininity and power. Queen Victoria, whose strength and longevity defined an age, possessed immense cultural as well as political power, even becoming a writer herself.

This cultural sovereignty, argues Gail Turley Houston, in the hands of a female monarch troubled writers, especially men, who worked during a reign that viewed women as domestic angels. By exploring a wide range of representations of the queen by significant Victorian writers, Houston points out the complexity of Victorian constructions of gender,...

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new...

Why did the Victorians collect with such a vengeance and exhibit in museums? Focusing on this key nineteenth-century enterprise, Barbara J. Black illuminates British culture of the period by examining the cultural power that this collecting and exhibiting possessed. Through its museums, she argues, Victorian London constructed itself as a world city.

Using the tools of cultural criticism, social history, and literary analysis, Black roots Victorian museum culture in key political events and cultural forces: British imperialism, exploration, and tourism; advances in science and...

The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as -childhood- became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society.

Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as...

Marie Corelli (1855-1924) was the most popular novelist of the turn of the century, outselling Hall Caine, Mrs. Humphry Ward, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle by the thousands. For thirty years she was ridiculed by reviewers and the literary elite--Edmund Gosse dismissed her as -that little milliner---but these opinions had no impact on her mass appeal. In 1895, with The Sorrows of Satan, she broke all previous publishing records, and by 1906 a Corelli novel sold 100,000 copies a year.

Idol of Suburbia returns Marie Corelli to conversations about the late-Victorian and Edwardian...