Victorian Period Editions

• 

  Phoebe Junior

  Margaret Oliphant, one of the most prolific and popular Victorian novelists, essayists, and reviewers, has been compared both in her day and our own to…

• 

  The Rebel of the Family

  The Rebel of the Family (1880) is the first New Woman novel by Eliza Lynn Linton. Perdita Winstanley, the novel’s protagonist, struggles to balance the…

• 

  Marcella

  Marcella, young and with a new-womanly independence, has a yearning to help the poor. When a gamekeeper is murdered near where she lives, Marcella finds…

• 

  The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant

  After the death of Margaret Oliphant—the prolific nineteenth-century novelist, biographer, essayist, reviewer, and prominent voice on the “woman question”—two well-intending relatives took the autobiographical manuscripts…

• 

  Wuthering Heights – Ed. Heywood

  Critics often comment on the importance of landscape in Wuthering Heights, and in this edition, Christopher Heywood locates the text more precisely than previous editions…

• 

  The Clever Woman of the Family

  Charlotte Mary Yonge was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Though perhaps best known for her popular children’s books, she also…

• 

  The Ring and the Book

  In June, 1860, Browning purchased an “old yellow book” from a bookstall in Florence. The book contained legal briefs, pamphlets, and letters relating to a…

• 

  David Copperfield

  In a preface to this novel, Dickens described David Copperfield as his “favorite child,” and the story has remained among the favorites of Dickens’ readers,…

• 

  The Time Machine

  Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time…

• 

  The Warden

  The first of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, The Warden concerns the moral dilemma of the Reverend Septimus Harding, who finds himself at the centre of a…

• 

  Lord Jim

  One of Joseph Conrad’s greatest novels, Lord Jim brilliantly combines adventure and analysis. Haunted by the memory of a moment of lost nerve during a…

• 

  Felix Holt, The Radical

  When William Blackwood, George Eliot’s publisher, first saw the manuscript of Felix Holt in 1866 he could not contain his enthusiasm; in a letter to…

• 

  Mary Barton

  Mary Barton first appeared in 1848, and has since become one of the best known novels on the ‘condition of England,’ part of a nineteenth-century…

• 

  Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems

  Augusta Webster was very widely praised in her own time—Christina Rossetti thought her “by far the most formidable” woman poet. Her work has again come…

• 

  East Lynne

  Lady Isabel Carlyle, a beautiful and refined young woman, leaves her hard-working but neglectful lawyer-husband and her infant children to elope with an aristocratic suitor.…

• 

  Jude the Obscure

  When Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure appeared in 1895, it immediately caused scandal and controversy. Its frank treatment of Jude’s sexual relationships with Arabella and…

• 

  The Moonstone

  Intrigue, investigations, thievery, drugs and murder all make an appearance in Collins’s classic who-done-it, The Moonstone. Published in serial form in 1868, it was inspired…

• 

  Great Expectations

  Originally published in serial form from December 1860 to August 1861, Great Expectations is the ‘autobiography’ of Pip, as he transformed from apprentice village blacksmith…

• 

  Aurora Floyd

  Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The…

• 

  The Odd Women

  George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact…

• 

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  In Oscar Wilde’s famous novel, Dorian Gray is tempted by Henry Wotton to sell his soul in order to hold on to beauty and youth.…

• 

  Dracula

  To borrow a phrase used by one of the characters in the novel, Dracula is “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” In her introduction to…

• 

  The Mayor of Casterbridge

  This 1886 novel may be Hardy’s most intense and gripping narrative. We first see the central character, Michael Henchard, as a drunken and unemployed hay-trusser…

• 

  Heart and Science

  Wilkie Collins’s later novels are often as concerned with social issues as they are with simple storytelling—but as more and more critics are suggesting, the…