These new essays by leading scholars explore nineteenth-century women's writing across a spectrum of genres. The book's focus is on women's role in and access to literary culture in the broadest sense, as consumers and interpreters as well as practitioners of that culture. Individual chapters consider women as journalists, editors, translators, scholars, actresses, playwrights, autobiographers, biographers, writers for children and religious writers as well as novelists and poets. A unique chronology offers a woman-centered perspective on literary and historical events and there is a guide to further reading.

This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

Dennis Low's re-evaluation of the Lake Poets as mentors begins with the controversial premise that Robert Southey was one of the nineteenth-century's greatest champions of women's writing. Together with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Low argues, Southey tried to end what he perceived to be the cultural decline of literature by nurturing the creative talents of many exceptional women writers. Drawing on 3,000 unpublished manuscripts in England, Scotland and the United States, Low examines the lives and works of four of the Lake Poets' literary protégées: Caroline Bowles, Maria Gowen Brooks, Sara Coleridge and Maria Jane Jewsbury. Though diverse in terms of their literary production, these women were united in their defiant efforts to write against an increasingly stagnant cultural milieu and their negotiation, wholeheartedly encouraged by their mentors, of contemporary publishing mores. This scrupulously researched book is a valuable contribution to the study of little-known women writers and to our understanding of the literary and publishing environment of Britain in the 1820s and 1830s.

This book explores how the publication of women’s life writing influenced the reputation of its writers and of the genre itself during the long nineteenth century. It provides case studies of Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson and Mary Hays, four writers whose names were caught up in debates about the moral and literary respectability of publishing the ‘private’. Focusing on gender, genre and authorship, this study examines key works of life writing by and about these women, and the reception of these texts. It argues for the importance of life writing—a crucial site of affective and imaginative identification—in shaping authorial reputation and afterlife. The book ultimately constructs a fuller picture of the literary field in the long nineteenth century and the role of women writers and their life writing within it.

Popular Victorian women writers considers a diverse group of women writers within the Victorian literary marketplace. It looks at authors such as Ellen Wood, Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Yonge as well as less well-known writers including Jessie Fothergill and Eliza Meteyard. Each essay sets the individual author within her biographical and literary context and provides refreshing insights into their work. Together they bring the work of largely unknown authors and new perspectives on known authors to critical and public attention. Accessible and informative, the book is ideal for students of Victorian literature and culture as well as tutors and scholars of the period.