Some of the greatest English novels were written during the Victorian era, and many are still widely read and taught today. But many others written during that period have been neglected by scholars and modern readers alike. A number of these novels were written by women and were popular when published. Moreover, they reveal perspectives of 19th-century British culture not present in canonized works and therefore revise our understanding of Victorian life and attitudes. With the increasing interest in revising Victorian history and gender scholarship, especially through the rediscovery of lost texts written by women, this book is a timely and much needed study. The expert contributors to this volume argue the value of novels by such Victorian women writers as Grace Aguilar, Catherine Crowe, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Annie E. Holdsworth, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Flora Annie Steel, Anne Thackeray, Sarah Grand, Marie Corelli, and others. Most of the chapters address numerous works by a particular writer. Each focuses on different social issues as well, though most of them share an interest in gender politics. Topics discussed include a 19th-century Jewish novelist's navigation through Protestant spirituality, the relationship of noncanonical governess novels to class and gender issues, and forgotten works by women crime writers. Other chapters analyze how women writers impelled social reform and subverted patriarchally defined religious issues.

This landmark book traces the rise and decline of the British autodidact from the pre-industrial era to the twentieth century. Using innovative research techniques and a vast range of unexpected sources such as workers' memoris, social surveys and library registers, Rose shows which books people read, how and why they educated themselves, and what they knew. In the process he shines a bold new light on working class politics, ideology, popular culture and the life of the mind. This book has won the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award 2001, the SHARP History Book Prize, the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History 2001 and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award. Book jacket.

This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing is prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works cover the Newgate genre, help to initiate detective fiction, include elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and point the way to the sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account--and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women's lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge's book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

Utilizing an array of cultural texts, fiction, servant autobiography, diaries and pamphlets, this study examines the debate on mass literacy as it developed around the figure of the Victorian servant, as well as its significance for understanding the nexus between class and narrative power in nineteenth-century literature.