Victorian Period

Showing 73–96 of 135 results

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • Criminals, Idiots, Women, & Minors – Second Edition

    “Pardon me; I must seem to you so stupid! Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman…

  • Literature of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in England

    During the British women’s suffrage campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women wrote plays to convert others to their cause; they wrote…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories

    The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories beautifully demonstrates the astonishing variety and ingenuity of Victorian short stories. This collection brings together works focused on…

  • 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

    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 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

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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

    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…