Victorian Period Editions

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  Villette

  Charlotte Brontë’s contemporary George Eliot wrote of Villette, “There is something almost preternatural in its power.” The deceptive stillness and security of a girls’ school…

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  John Halifax, Gentleman

  This 1856 novel, one of the most beloved of the Victorian period, follows the life, from childhood to death, of an orphaned boy who grows…

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  Shakespeare’s Heroines

  First published in 1832, Shakespeare’s Heroines is a unique hybrid of Shakespeare criticism, women’s rights activism, and conduct literature. Jameson’s collection of readings of female…

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  Mrs Warren’s Profession

  One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the…

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  Adam Bede

  The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century’s great novelists. With sympathy,…

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  Moths

  First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere…

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  Oliver Twist

  Charles Dickens’s famous second novel recounts the story of a boy born in the workhouse and raised in an infant farm as he tries to…

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  The Way We Live Now

  The Way We Live Now—regarded by many as Anthony Trollope’s greatest novel—encompasses in its broad scope much of the business, political, social, and literary life…

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  Romola

  The most exotic of George Eliot’s works, Romola recounts the story of the famous religious leader Savonarola in Florence at the time of Machiavelli and…

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  Illustrations of Political Economy

  Published in 1832, Illustrations of Political Economy established Harriet Martineau as both a successful and controversial author and a pioneer of nineteenth-century “social problem” writing.…

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  Middlemarch

  George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) is one of the classic novels of English literature and was admired by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English…

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  The Communist Manifesto

  L.M. Findlay’s elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history…

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  The Woman Who Did

  The controversial subject matter of Grant Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Did, made it a major bestseller in 1895. It tells the story of Herminia…

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  Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880-1907

  The Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880, both shaped and reflected tensions between traditional domestic ideologies of the period and New Woman values in the…

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  The Beetle

  The Beetle (1897) tells the story of a fantastical creature, “born of neither god nor man,” with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician…

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  Wormwood

  Though disparaged by literary critics of her day, Marie Corelli was one of the most popular novelists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Wormwood…

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  The Story of a Modern Woman

  Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman originally appeared in serial form in the women’s weekly The Lady’s Pictorial. Like Hepworth Dixon herself,…

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  The Type-Writer Girl

  Juliet Appleton is an officer’s daughter who is forced to make her own way in the world after her father’s death. Having been trained in…

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  Blind Love

  Blind Love is Wilkie Collins’s final novel. Although he did not live to complete the work, he left detailed plans for the last third of…

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  Lady Audley’s Secret

  Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. The novel exemplifies “sensation fiction” in featuring a beautiful…

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  Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings

  For the first time in over a century, this edition makes available the work of the most important Jewish writer in early and mid-Victorian Britain.…

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  On the Origin of Species

  Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, in which he writes of his theories of evolution by natural selection, is one of the most important…

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  Life in the Sick-Room

  Believing herself to be suffering from an incurable condition, Harriet Martineau wrote Life in the Sick-Room in 1844. In this work, which is both memoir…

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  The War of the Worlds

  H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, the first story to speculate about the consequences of aliens (from Mars) with superior technology landing on…