"Miss Meredith" is an 1889 novel by Amy Levy. A romantic novel set in Pisa, Italy, "Miss Meredith" is a must read for classic romantic fiction fans. Amy Judith Levy (1861—1889) was a British poet, novelist, and essayist. She was notably the first Jewish woman to study at Cambridge university, and she became well-known for her feminist positions as well as her romantic relationships with both male and female political and literature figures. Contents...

Lord Colambre can see that his pretentious mother's social ambitions earn her nothing but contempt from London's fashionable society. And it's come to his attention that his father's finances have suffered a good deal underwriting his wife's extravagances. Anxious about his family's fortunes, Colambre departs Cambridge for Ireland to assess his father's estates firsthand. There he finds his absent father's tenants sorely put upon by the estate's agent....

Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children's violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds...

A little girl falls down a rabbit hole and discovers a world of nonsensical and amusing characters.

Argues that the descriptions of buildings frequently encountered in Victorian novels offer more than evocative settings for characters and plot; instead, such descriptions signal these novels' self-reflexive consideration of the structure itself. Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention,...

Examines how literature mediated a convergence of militarism and medicine in Victorian culture that continues into the present via a widespread martial metaphor. Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as "the war against the coronavirus," "the front lines of the Ebola crisis," "a new weapon against antibiotic resistance," or "the immune system fights cancer" without considering their assumptions,...

Jeff Nunokawa is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Tame Passions of Wilde (Princeton). In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa investigates the conviction passed on by the Victorian novel that a woman's love is the only fortune a man can count on to last. Taking for his example four texts, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Dombey and Son, and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner, Nunokawa...

John Kucich is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction; Repression in Victorian Fiction; and Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens. He is also the coeditor of Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising...

"Winner of the 1998 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, British Academy" "Winner of the 1998 First Book Prize, Modern Language Association" Katie Trumpener is Associate Professor of English, Germanic Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain's overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw...

This revealing romp through proper society follows three different women who dare to defy Victorian standards. Can You Forgive Her? comically intertwines the stories of three very independent-minded women who each desires to decide her own fate in a world where love comes second to obedience and familial expectations set them apart from their peers. First and foremost is the spirited Alice Vavasor, whose indecision and repeated rejections of two...