NINETEENTH CENTURY WOMEN WRITERS

Part 1: Authors including Matilda Betham-Edwards, Florence Marryat, Helen Mathers, Charlotte Riddell, Dora Russell, Adeline Sergeant and Emma Jane Worboise

Publisher's Note

The last fifteen years have seen a remarkable revival of academic interest in nineteenth-century popular fiction. Many biographies of “lost” women writers of the period have appeared and the genres of the sensation and the New Woman novel have received critical attention from scholars. Up-to-date critical editions of out of print writers have recently been published and their rightful place has once again been recognised. This research has recovered and evaluated a mass of fiction by women writers that was highly influential in the development of the mid-Victorian novel. It is gradually being recognised that reading of these novels by women enriches our understanding and interpretation of Victorian fiction in general. As Emma Liggins and Andrew Maunder in an article in Women’s Writing, 2004 remark:

“They can be taken as examples of the way in which nineteenth-century women writers entered public discourse and engaged with some of the controversial topics of the day: marriage and divorce, class boundaries, bigamy, prostitution, the sexual double standard, male and female sexuality, masculinity, motherhood and degeneration”.

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