This ground-breaking anthology brings together a wide selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama), most of which cannot be easily found elsewhere. There are writings from more than 60 authors, including such well known writers as Harriet Martineau, Laetitia Landon, Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell, Barbara Bodichon, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Margaret Oliphant. The volume covers a broad range of public and private genres from the period including poetry, critical essays, biography, travel literature, political commentary, letters, diaries and journals.Key Features* An introduction which places the writings in historical and literary context, a chronological table and author biographies* Textual and explanatory notes to each text* An index of themes which enables teachers to select materials to suit their courses

This ground-breaking anthology brings together a wide selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama), most of which cannot be easily found elsewhere.

Table of contents

An unconventional figure in an age that excluded women from government, Victoria was accorded prominence unavailable to any male monarch. Yet as Adrienne Munich argues in this fascinating work, the originality of the solid, dour icon that was Victoria lay, paradoxically, in her very ordinariness. The first book to fully investigate the influence of this icon of British history, Queen Victoria's Secrets demonstrates the firm grasp the queen held on the cultural imagination of her country, exploring how Victoria created and maintained her royal authority. Gracefully weaving together feminist, anthropological, and postcolonial approaches, Munich searches out the myriad, often contradictory incarnations of the queen in the minds of her people. How did Victoria convincingly maintain her power for forty years after Prince Albert's death, never giving up her identity as a grieving widow? How did Victorian society's reverential treatment of their queen conflate with the monarch's plain, middle class public image? These are some of the secrets Munich examines in her richly detailed work. In demonstrating the subtle but powerful ways in which Victoria performed significant cultural work, Queen Victoria's Secrets goes against the grain of Victoria scholarship, which has tended to overlook the queen's political and cultural centrality. This stylish, accessible portrait will be of great interest to those who are fascinated by the myth-making and secrets of the Victorian age.

Deliberately excluded from this volume are fiction and drama but the anthology contains poetry, critical essays, diaries, travel literature, political commentary and journals. An introduction relates each text to the literature of the period.

Daniel Karlin has selected poetry written and published during the reign of Queen Victoria, (1837-1901). Giving pride of place to Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the volume offers generous selections from other major poets such asArnold, Emily Bronte, Hardy and Hopkins, and makes room for several poem-sequences in their entirety. It is wonderful, too, in its discovery and inclusion of eccentric, dissenting, un-Victorian voices, poets who squarely refuse to 'represent' their period. It also includes the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Meredith, James Thomson and Augusta Webster.

A reluctant lady sleuth finds she's investigating her own family. 1881, Sussex. With a drowned husband—the second love lost—an overbearing family, no longed-for child, and the responsibility of a huge baroque mansion, it's not surprising Lady Helena Whitcombe is overwhelmed. When attractive, mysterious, French physician Armand Fortier disturbs her first weeks of mourning with his theory of murder, Helena's reluctant and ineffective attempts at investigation are hardly life-changing—until the resulting revival in her long-abandoned herbalist studies bring her into confrontation with her past and her family's. Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings' assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier—who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl's daughter—play in her investigations? Every family has its secrets. The Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.