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...

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...

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...

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...

In recent years Christina Rossetti's star has soared. Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets--not just one of the major women poets--of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. When complete in four volumes, this project will make available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost...

The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of strict asceticism in its broadest definition--the refusal of physical pleasure or comfort in the interests of moral or spiritual gain. As a result, his commentators have felt obliged to take a stand approving or disapproving of this rigorous self-discipline: Many idealize his allegiance to the Society of Jesus as motivated by his determination to conquer his attraction to other men, and thus as the source of the spiritual strength from which his eucharistic and Christological verse derived. Others decry his monasticism as the...

Sensation novels, a genre characterized by scandalous narratives and emotionally and socially provocative dialogue and plots, had their heyday in England in the 1860s and 1870s, in the midst of growing concern about codes of behavior in marriage. Largely excluded from the academic canon of the late twentieth century, sensation novels had an impact on Victorian culture that we have only recently begun to evaluate.

Exploring the central metaphor of marital violence in these novels, Marlene Tromp uncovers the relationship between the representations of such violence in fiction and in...

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...

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...