Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of her close friend Charlotte Bronte was published in 1857 to immediate popular acclaim, and remains the most significant study of the enigmatic author who gave Jane Eyre the subtitle An Autobiography. It recounts Charlotte Bronte's life from her isolated childhood, through her years as a writer who had 'foreseen the single life' for herself, to her marriage at thirty-eight and death less than a year later. The resulting work - the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist - explored the nature of Charlotte's genius and almost...

As a Scottish woman and expatriate, Mrs. Oliphant (1828-97) began her prolific writing career removed in many ways from the center of Victorian literary life. Widowed early, she became keenly aware of the discrepancy between society's assumptions about women's roles and her own position as a female breadwinner in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century publishing. This lucid and comprehensive biography considers the way in which a particular woman writer perceived her own life, and the wider question of whether women writers have been well-served by the mythological structures of male...

By the start of the Victorian period the school of British economists acknowledging Adam Smith as its master was in the ascendancy. 'Political Economy', a catch-all title which ignored the diversity of viewpoints to be found amongst the discipline's leading proponents, became associated in the popular mind with moral and political forces held to be uniquely conducive to the progress of an increasingly industrialised and competitive society. 'Political Economy' served in turn as the focus for critics of equally diverse moral and political persuasions, who sought to challenge the materialism of...

This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life's work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant...

This study re-evaluates the achievement of the least well-known of the Bronte sisters by exploring Anne Bronte''s complex and critical engagements with questions relating to gender and education, sexuality and power, subjectivity and loss'

This book is devoted to the writings of the Evangelical and Oxford movements, whose leading members were key figures in the religious debate that so preoccupied early Victorian society.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work.