No figure among the Victorians surpasses John Ruskin in magnitude of genius, modernity of message, or mastery of prose. Yet for the first half-century after his death in 1900, his genius lay largely undiscovered. First published in 1963, John D. Rosenberg's The Genius of John Ruskin aimed to make Ruskin's ideas and writings accessible to the modern reader, and it quickly became a classic. Long out of print, this important anthology is now available with a new foreword by Herbert F. Tucker and an expanded and updated bibliography by the author that takes into account recent Ruskin...

Victorian women's autobiography emerged at a historical moment when the field of life writing was particularly rich. Spiritual autobiography was developing interesting variations in the heroic memoirs of pioneering missionary women and in probing intellectual analyses of Nonconformists, Anglicans, agnostics, and other religious thinkers. The chroniques scandaleuses of the eighteenth century were giving way to the respectable artist's life of the professional Victorian woman. The domestic memoir, a Victorian variation on the family histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,...

Emily Shore's journal is the unique self-representation of a prodigious young Victorian woman. From July 5, 1831, at the age of eleven, until June 24, 1839, two weeks before her death from consumption, Margaret Emily Shore recorded her reactions to the world around her. She wrote of political issues, natural history, her progress as a scholar and scientist, and the worlds of art and literature. In her brief life, this remarkable young woman also produced, but did not publish, three novels, three books of poetry, and histories of the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans, and she published...