"Political Matters" features essays relating to politics in such writers as Eliot, Gaskell, EB Browning, and Grote. Other sections of this volume include the first publication of one of Wilkie Collins's working diaries, essays on Curzon and Corelli, the translation of a text used by the English to propagandize in China, and books reviews by noted Victorianists such as Frank Turner, John Maynard, and Karen Chase.

Sophia Andres on A.s. Byatt and Tracy Chevalier; Nicole Fluhr on Swinburne; LuAnn Fletcher on the Brontes and Eastlake; Paul Marchbanks on R. Browning; Maria McGarrity on Mary Seacole; Michelle Mouton on Trollope; June Szirotny on Eliot; Casey Cothran on Collins; Lara Kapenko on Du Maurier; Simon Cooke on Oiliphant -- plus ten reviews.

In her examination of neglected diaristic texts, Anne-Marie Millim expands the field of Victorian diary criticism by complicating the conventional notion of diaries as mainly private sources of biographical information. She argues that for Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, Henry Crabb Robinson, George Eliot, George Gissing, John Ruskin, Edith Simcox and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the exposure or publication of their diaries was a real possibility that they either coveted or feared. Millim locates the diary at the intersection of the public and private spheres to show that well-known writers and public figures of both sexes exploited the diary's self-reflexive, diurnal structure in order to enhance their creativity and establish themselves as authors. Their object was to manage, rather than to indulge or repress, their emotions for the purposes of perfecting their observational and critical skills. Reading these diaries as literary works in their own right, Millim analyses their crucial role in the construction of authorship. By relating these Victorian writers' diaries to their publications and to contemporary works of cultural criticism, Millim shows the multifarious ways in which diaristic practices, emotional management and professional output corresponded to experiences of the literary marketplace and to nineteenth-century codes of propriety.