Stories about Jewesses proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain as debates about the place of the Jews in the nation raged. While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in this period, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire. Reading a range of texts from popular romance to the realist novel, she investigates how the complex figure of the Jewess brought the instabilities of nineteenth-century religious, racial and national identity into uniquely sharp focus. Tracing the narrative of the Jewess from its beginnings in Romantic and Evangelical literature, and reading canonical writers including Walter Scott, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope alongside more minor figures such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, Valman demonstrates the remarkable persistence of this narrative and its myriad transformations across the century.

For the first time in over a century, this edition makes available the work of the most important Jewish writer in early and mid-Victorian Britain. Grace Aguilar (1816-1847) broke new literary ground by writing from the unique perspective of an Anglo-Jewish woman. Aguilar's writing responds to English representations of Jews and women by writers such as Felicia Hemans, Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Macaulay. She both assimilates and alters the genres of historical romance, dramatic monologue, domestic fiction, history, and midrash, among others. This edition includes Aguilar's novella The Perez Family in its entirety; the Sephardic historical romance "The Escape," her Sephardic historical romance, "History of the Jews in England," the first such history ever written by a Jew; major poems; excerpts from The Women of Israel; and Aguilar's Frankfurt journal, never before published. Also included are primary source materials such as writings on "the Jewish question" from Aguilar's non-Jewish contemporaries, tributes and memoirs, and contemporary responses to her work.