Topics in Literature

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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 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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  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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  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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  Pink Snow

  Drawing on recent developments in gay studies and queer theory, Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction offers new interpretations that focus on homoerotic resonances…

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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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  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…

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  A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter

  Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England (1799) is a radical response to the rampant anti-feminist sentiment of the late 1790s. In this…

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  Imre

  Winner of the 2003 Silver Medal for Gay/Lesbian Fiction, ForeWord Magazine Imre is one of the first openly gay American novels without a tragic ending.…

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  Looking Backward: 2000 – 1887

  Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) is one of the most influential utopian novels in English. The narrative follows Julian West, who goes to sleep…

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  The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother

  This Broadview edition pairs the first Gothic novel with the first Gothic drama, both by Horace Walpole. Published on Christmas Eve, 1764, on Walpole’s private…

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  The Good Soldier

  One of the most important works of twentieth-century British literature, The Good Soldier addresses the lives and interrelationships between two couples: one American, one British.…

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  News from Nowhere

  Written in 1890, at the close of William Morris’s most intense period of political activism, News from Nowhere is a compelling articulation of his mature…

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  A Known Scribbler

  Frances Burney’s journals and letters, composed between 1768 and 1839, contain a unique account of the creative, social, and commercial ambitions and achievements of an…

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  The Old Manor House

  In The Old Manor House (1794), Charlotte Smith combines elements of the romance, the Gothic, recent history, and culture to produce both a social document…

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  Essays on Race and Empire

  This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in…