Victorian Period

  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

    The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

    Anne Brontë’s second and last novel was widely and contentiously reviewed upon its 1848 publication, in part because its subject matter domestic violence, alcoholism, women’s…

  • Autobiographical Sketches

    Autobiographical Sketches

    Annie Wood Besant (1847-1933) was a problematic and notorious figure in Victorian England, questioning and then breaking from the Anglican Church to become an atheist,…

  • Michael Field: The Poet

    Michael Field: The Poet

    “Michael Field” was the literary pseudonym of two women, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). The women were poets, playwrights, diarist, and…

  • The Island of Doctor Moreau

    The Island of Doctor Moreau

    A classic of science fiction and a dark meditation on Darwinian thought in the late Victorian period, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores the possibility…

  • The Victorian Art of Fiction

    The Victorian Art of Fiction

    The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre,…

  • The Diary of a Nobody

    The Diary of a Nobody

    The Diary of a Nobody, the spoof diary of Charles Pooter, a London clerk, first appeared as a book in 1892 and has never been…

  • The Coming Race

    The Coming Race

    The Coming Race is the crowning achievement of the genre of hollow earth fiction, in which a hero makes a perilous journey underground and discovers…

  • A Sunless Heart

    A Sunless Heart

    In A Sunless Heart, Edith Johnstone establishes a feverish atmosphere for her novel’s story of emotional and physical hardship and the power of bonds between…

  • Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain

    Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain

    Though working-class women in the nineteenth century included many accomplished and prolific poets, their work has often been neglected by critics and readers in favour…

  • The Water-Babies

    The Water-Babies

    Among the most popular children’s books of the Victorian period, The Water-Babies continues to delight readers of all ages. It tells the story of a…

  • The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs Tanqueray

    The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was the theatrical sensation of the London stage in 1893. It established Pinero as the leading English dramatist of serious social…

  • New Grub Street

    New Grub Street

    New Grub Street is the only one of George Gissing’s two dozen novels never to have gone out of print, and has long been recognized…

  • Jack Sheppard

    Jack Sheppard

    In London Labour and the London Poor (1861) Henry Mayhew wrote, “Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young…

  • Wuthering Heights - Ed. Newman

    Wuthering Heights – Ed. Newman

    Over a hundred and fifty years after its initial publication, Emily Brontë’s turbulent portrayal of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, two northern English households nearly…

  • Factory Lives

    Factory Lives

    Factory Lives contains four works of great importance in the field of nineteenth-century working-class autobiography: John Brown’s A Memoir of Robert Blincoe; William Dodd’s A…

  • The Mill on the Floss

    The Mill on the Floss

    This classic novel, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver. Intelligent and headstrong but trapped by the conventions of family tradition and…

  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Second Edition

    Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Second Edition

    This classic novel tells the story of how the poor rural couple John and Joan Durbeyfield become convinced that they are descended from the ancient…

  • Autobiography

    Autobiography

    Harriet Martineau lived an extraordinary literary life. She became a reviewer and journalist in the 1820s when her family’s fortune collapsed; published a best-selling series,…

  • The Woman in White

    The Woman in White

    As the inscription on his tombstone reveals, Wilkie Collins wanted to be remembered as the “author of The Woman in White,” for it was this…

  • Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales

    Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales

    Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, “My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that…

  • Reuben Sachs

    Reuben Sachs

    Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word,…

  • The Romance of a Shop

    The Romance of a Shop

    The Romance of a Shop is an early “New Woman” novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own…

  • She

    She

    First published in 1886–87, H. Rider Haggard’s imperial romance follows its English heroes from the quiet rooms of Cambridge to the uncharted interior of Africa…

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles

    The Hound of the Baskervilles

    The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02) is Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated Sherlock Holmes adventure. At the end of the yew tree path of his…