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Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s shocking and suspenseful novel Lady Audley’s Secret was one of the most popular examples of the “sensation fiction” craze of the 1860s. Within a year of the novel appearing in book form, no less than three theatrical adaptations appeared on the London stage. Braddon took strong issue with two of these, but…

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 criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. To its contemporary readers, it also offered the thrill of uncovering blackmail and criminal violence within the…

Shaped by sound literary and historical scholarship, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature takes a fresh approach to many canonical authors and includes a broad selection of work by lesser-known writers. The anthology also provides wide-ranging coverage of the worldwide connections of British literature, and it pays attention throughout to matters such as race, gender,…

“The female novelist of the nineteenth century may have frequently encountered opposition and interference from the male literary establishment, but the female short story writer, working in a genre that was seen as less serious and less profitable, found her work to be actively encouraged.” — from the Introduction. During the nineteenth century women writers…

As Nina Auerbach argues in her introduction to Our Vampires, Ourselves, vampires are “personifications of their age.” Vampire Literature: An Anthology is the first anthology designed specifically to introduce students and general readers to the history, theory, and cultural impact of the literary vampire. With coverage from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first, Vampire…

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 a wide range of popular Victorian subjects in many different styles and forms (including comic, gothic, fantasy, adventure, and colonial works; science fiction; children’s tales; New Woman writing; Irish yarns;…

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, the essays concern a range of topics including poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, the roles of literature and of criticism, topical reviews of major works, and retrospectives of major authors. Together,…

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamond—among the most compelling and thought-provoking of Margaret Oliphant’s works of short fiction—tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Lycett-Landon, “two middle-aged people in the fullness of life and prosperity,” and of what becomes of their marriage when Mr. Lycett-Landon becomes uncommunicative while on an extended business trip. In addition to…

Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication in 1847. Its representation of the underside of domestic life and the hypocrisy behind religious enthusiasm drew both praise and bitter criticism, while Charlotte Brontë’s striking exposé of poor living…

Aurora Floyd is one of the leading novels in the genre known as ‘sensation fiction’—a tradition in which the key texts include Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Dickens’s Great Expectations. When Aurora Floyd was first published in serial form in 1862-63, Fraser’s magazine asserted that “a book without a…

The texts in this unique collection range from the Gothic Revival of the late eighteenth century through to the late Victorian gothic, and from the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the short fiction of H.G. Wells and Henry James. Genres represented include medievalist poetry, psychological thrillers, dark political dystopias, sinister tales of social corruption,…