Editions

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

    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…

  • Emma

    Emma

    Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) tells the story of the coming of age of Emma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” who “had lived nearly twenty-one years…

  • The Beetle

    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…

  • Wormwood

    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…

  • The History of Ophelia

    The History of Ophelia

    In the mid-eighteenth century, Sarah Fielding (1710-68) was the second most popular English woman novelist, rivaled only by Eliza Haywood. The History of Ophelia, the…

  • Common Sense

    Common Sense

    When Common Sense was published in January 1776, it sold, by some estimates, a stunning 150,000 copies in the colonies. What exactly made this pamphlet…

  • Between Two Worlds

    Between Two Worlds

    Set in Soweto outside Johannesburg, Between Two Worlds is one of the most important novels of South Africa under apartheid. Originally published under the title…

  • Fantomina and Other Works

    Fantomina and Other Works

    This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, highly engaging Haywood works: The Tea-Table…

  • Anti-Pamela and Shamela

    Anti-Pamela and Shamela

    Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most…

  • The Story of a Modern Woman

    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,…

  • The Type-Writer Girl

    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…

  • The Wonder

    The Wonder

    Susanna Centlivre’s play The Wonder (1714) was one of the most popular works on the eighteenth-century English stage. Set in Lisbon, the plot interweaves two…

  • Blind Love

    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…

  • The Monk

    The Monk

    The Monk is the most sensational of Gothic novels. The main plot concerns Ambrosio, an abbot of irreproachable holiness, who is seduced by a woman…

  • Lady Audley's Secret

    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…

  • An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting

    An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting

    Perhaps the first extended non-fiction prose satire written by an English woman, Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) is a…

  • Emmeline

    Emmeline

    The plot of Charlotte Smith’s autobiographical first novel Emmeline (1788) includes the usual thrills of the eighteenth-century courtship novel: abduction, duels, and a “fairy tale…

  • Doc

    Doc

    When Catherine returns home on the eve of ceremonies honouring her physician father, she unleashes a kaleidoscope of memories as father and daughter attempt to…

  • Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings

    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.…

  • On the Origin of Species

    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…

  • Diana of Dobson's

    Diana of Dobson’s

    Very successful when first performed in London in 1908, Diana of Dobson’s introduces its audience to the overworked and underpaid female assistants at Dobson’s Drapery…

  • Life in the Sick-Room

    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…

  • The War of the Worlds

    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…

  • A Christmas Carol

    A Christmas Carol

    Emerging from Dickens’s preoccupation in the early 1840s with issues of poverty, ignorance, and cruelty, this classic story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, visited by four ghosts…