A compendious illustrated guide to those industrious but often overlooked women writers of the Victorian era: the famous, the forgotten and the forlorn. More than 1,500 women authors, along with over 400 pseudonyms, 400 quotes and extracts, and a further 40 subject entries and essays.
Not just the familiar names - though they're all there - but literally hundreds of minor and middle-ranking authors, along with the magazines they were serialized in, the trends, the publishers, and the disadvantages and problems women writers faced in what was assumed to be a man's world.
You'll find entries on
The
Bigamy Novel
, Children's Literature, Domestic Fiction,
Feminism First Faltering Footsteps
, Ghost Stories, Governess Stories, Literary Style, Living in a Man's World,
Morality and Religion
, The New Woman, Romance,
Sensation Novels
, Silly and Silver Fork Novels,
Social Conditions and Reform
, The Three-Decker novel, Tracts and Tract Societies,
Travellers and Explorers
, 'Womanly Fiction', 'Woman's Place'
- and more. This is a popular encyclopaedia, not an academic text. It's a book to read and enjoy, to dip into and consult for reference, and it's very readable. Not only is it written in easy-to-read prose but (almost uniquely) it is packed with extracts from Victorian women's writing - paragraphs, short scenes, verses - to bring these authors back to life.