'Popular Victorian women writers' is a collection of essays on a diverse group of women writers working within the Victorian literary marketplace. The book includes essays on well-known authors such as Ellen Wood, Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Yonge but also includes pieces on writers such as Jessie Fothergill and Eliza Meteyard who are rarely read nowadays, even by Victorian specialists. Fothergill and Meteyard, together with Mary Howitt, form a trio of writers considered within the book whose writing focused particularly on issues of social progress. Wood, Braddon and...