Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Encounters in the Victorian Periodical Press focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press - its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors. Encounters promoted dialogue among diverse publics, differing by class, gender, professional and political interests, and ethnicity. Through encounters, the press emerged to become a central public space for debates about society, politics, culture, public order, and foreign and imperial affairs. This book captures the richness of these interactions and a variety of voices and opinions.

Based on extensive new research investigating the range of women’s involvement in early nineteenth-century popular politics, mid-Victorian reform and the women’s movements of the late century, Women and the People makes an original intervention in the historiography of the radical tradition by exploring the interconnections of populism, liberalism and feminism. Attending to authorship, the study argues that the representational forms adopted by radicals were as important as the content of what they said in shaping their self-perception, their construction of others, and the reception of their ideas. In fiction, poetry and autobiography, as well as in political writing, speeches and journalism, women reworked radical conventions and imagined new models of political identity, participation and authority. Though, in general, radicals appealed to ’the people’, women were often positioned as the suffering objects of reform rather than as the agents of change. By showing how they challenged or reinforced these conceptions of ’women’ and ’the people’, the book contends that radical women invoked alternative communities of sex, class and nation, and helped to remake and discipline the political sphere, as they strove to make it their own.

Discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880, including serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women; sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels. During these years, some women were struggling to become women, instead of the angels of purity that sentimental morality had made of them. The sexual woman, the whore, the mistress, the runaway wife, the seduced or fallen innocent, all attracted a cluster of ideas about the differences between women and men, about the power structure in sexual relationships, and about women's place in the social and moral world. In considering these topics, this book traces women and illuminates differences in the fiction writer for different social classes. -- Publisher description