The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; postcolonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career - from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame - and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown.

Introduction: Victorian women writers and modern literary criticism Linda H. Peterson; Part I. Victorian Women Writers' Careers: 1. Making a debut Alexis Easley; 2. Becoming a professional writer Joanne Shattock; 3. Working with publishers Linda H. Peterson; 4. Assuming the role of editor Beth Palmer; 5. Achieving fame and canonicity Alison Chapman; Part II. Victorian Women Writers' Achievements: Genres and Modes: 6. Poetry Linda K. Hughes; 7. Silver-fork, industrial, and Gothic fiction Ella Dzelzainis; 8. The Realist novel Deirdre d'Albertis; 9. Sensation and New Woman fiction Lyn Pykett; 10. Drama and theater Katherine Newey; 11. Life writing Carol Hanberry Mackay; 12. Travel writing Tamara S. Wagner; 13. Colonial and imperial writing Mary Ellis Gibson and Jason R. Rudy; 14. History writing Deborah A. Logan; 15. Periodical writing Margaret Beetham; 16. Reviewing Joanne Wilkes; 17. Children's writing Claudia Nelson.

Linda H. Peterson (1948–2015) was Niel Gray, Jr Professor of English at Yale University. She was the author of Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999) and Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Victorian Market (2009).