British Literature

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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 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…

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  Revolutions in Romantic Literature

  This concise Broadview anthology of primary source materials is unique in its focus on Romantic literature and the ways in which the period itself was…

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  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…

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  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…

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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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  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…

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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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  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…

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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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  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…

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  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…

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  The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama: Concise Edition

  The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its…

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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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  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…

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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…

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  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…

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  A Serious Occupation

  This anthology of literary criticism by Victorian women of letters brings together a wealth of difficult-to-find writings. Originally published from the 1830s through the 1890s,…

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  The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama

  The London theatres arguably were the central cultural institutions in England during the Romantic period, and certainly were arenas in which key issues of the…

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  Trilby

  Du Maurier’s Trilby was the novel sensation of the 1890s. Du Maurier had spent a good deal of his life as a child and later…

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  The Story of an African Farm

  The Story of an African Farm (1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests…