First published in 1998, this volume follows the life and work of Adelaide Procter (1825-1864), one of the most important 19th-century women poets to be reassessed by literary critics in recent years. She was a significant figure in the Victorian literary landscape. A poet (who outsold most writers bar Tennyson), a philanthropist and Roman Catholic convert, Procter committed herself to the cause of single, fallen and homeless women. She was a key member of the Langham Place Circle of campaigning women and worked tirelessly for the society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Many of her poems are concerned with anonymous and displaced women who struggle to secure an identity and place in the world. She also writes boldly and unconventionally of women’s sexual desires. Loved and admired by her father the poet Bryan Procter, her editor Charles Dickens and her friend W.M. Thackeray, Procter wrote from the heart of London literary circles. From this position she mounted a subtle and creative critique of the ideas and often gendered positions adopted by male predecessors and contemporaries such as John Keble, Robert Browning and Dickens himself. Gill Gregory’s The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers considers the career of this compelling and remarkable woman and discusses the extent to which she struggled to find her own voice in response to the works of some seminal literary ‘fathers’.

Excerpt from Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall): An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes, With Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends I have been asked - and the request, from the circumstances, has the force of a command - to edit the following memoranda by Mr. Procter relating to himself and his contemporaries, and to accompany them by a few remarks, biographical and otherwise, of my own. My only qualification for this task lies in the fact of my having known and loved Mr. Procter for more than thirty years. Inasmuch as he was, during that period, the friend of almost every person of character in art or letters, and as I saw less of him, owing to my having lived nearly always out of London, than many of his friends did, this qualification seems to me to be an inadequate one. But of that I have not been allowed to judge. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.