
The Odd Women
George Gissing’s The Odd Women dramatizes key issues relating to class and gender in late-Victorian culture: the changing relationship between the sexes, the social impact of ‘odd’ or ‘redundant’ women, the cultural impact of ‘the new woman,’ and the opportunities for and conditions of employment in the expanding service sector of the economy. At the…

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 as the most important novel of the nineteenth century on the subject of the writing professions. Indeed, no novel in the English tradition even remotely approximates the thoroughness, sophistication, and…
Victorian Literature
VICTORIAN LITERATURE Nineteenth-Century Stories by Women: An Anthology Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (19th C) Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry (1830s-1880s) (BABL Edition) In Memoriam (1850) Alfred, Lord Tennyson Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) Harriet Martineau Life in the Sick-Room (1844) Harriet Martineau Autobiography (1877) Harriet Martineau Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) Frances Trollope Factory…

Heart of Darkness – Ed. Goonetilleke – Third Edition
The first incarnation of this Broadview edition of Heart of Darkness appeared in 1995, the second in 1999; both were widely acclaimed, and the Goonetilleke Heart of Darkness remained for many years one of Broadview’s best-selling titles. For the third edition the book has been completely revised and updated to take account of the scholarship…

Bleak House
The labyrinthine, ingenious plot of Bleak House focuses on the seemingly endless lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an inheritance dispute that has been moving through the courts for years. Dozens of characters, including the innocent young narrator Esther Summerson, her friends Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, and the jaded aristocrats Sir Leicester and Lady Honoria Dedlock,…

A City Girl
In April 1888, Friedrich Engels wrote a letter to the English novelist and journalist Margaret Harkness, expressing his appreciation for her first novel, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, calling it “a small work of art.” A City Girl was one of many slum novels set in the East End of London in the 1880s.…

The Girl Behind the Keys
“As the door was thrust open, I heard, as in a dream, the voice of Neal Larrard—calm and cool as ever—dictating to me; mechanically, my fingers touched the keys, and I began to type. While I did so, I felt that fearful dead thing pressing against my knees, and felt also the muzzle of the…