Most of the UToledo Libraries shelve books according to Library of Congress (LC) Call Numbers. Each letter designates a broad subject area and is further divided into two letter subjects and then by a number.
The letter P represents Languages and Literature
PA Classical Languages & Literature
PE English Language
PN Literary History & Film
PQ Romance Languages Literature
PR English Literature
PS American Literature
This guide was designed to help you find library and other resources relating to Victorian women writers. Selected resources will provide links to information in this subject area. Use tabs above to navigate to different sections of this guide.
The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English by
This Guide aims to consolidate and epitomise the re-reading of women's writing that has gone on in the last twenty-five years. This is an opportunity for stock-taking - a timely project, when so much writing has been rediscovered, reclaimed and republished. There are entries on writers, on individual texts, and on general terms, genres and movements, all printed in a single alphabetical sequence. The earliest written documents in medieval English (the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) are covered in an historical - and geographical - sweep that takes us up to the present day. The book reflects the spread of literacy, the history of colonisation and the development of post-colonial cultures using and changing the English language. The entries are written by contributors from all the countries covered. The result is a work of reference with a unique feeling for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women's writing.
Encyclopedia of British Women Writers by
This far-reaching examination of women writers identified with Great Britain builds on its predecessor's strengths, with 50 percent new material and completely updated entries. Over six hundred writers are discussed in terms of their biographies--with precise details where these could be ascertained and in come cases correcting biographies in other reference works--as well as in terms of thematic issues and critical reception. Each entry includes a definitive bibliography of the writer and a thorough secondary bibliography (including book-length studies, reference works, major essays, and reviews) to lead readers to other sources. Available in paperback for the first time, this book is an ideal desk reference for scholar and student alike. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter have individually and jointly written and edited a number of critical and reference works, including The English Novel: Twentieth Century Criticism (Vol. 2: Twentieth Century Novelists) and Modern American Literature (Supplement 2). Paul Schlueter's books include The Novels of Doris Lessing and Shirley Ann Grau. June Schlueter, Provost, and Dana Professor of English at Lafayette College, has edited Feminist Readings of Modern American Drama and Modern American Drama: The Female Canon.
Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750-1900 by
This collection of new essays examines the pervasive influence of religion upon the lives and strategies of late eighteenth and nineteenth century women activists. The book discusses a wide range of issues from female education to lesbian passion, and the authors demonstrate through detailed case-studies, women's skilful negotiation of the boundaries between personal religious beliefs, moral attitudes and social action.
Silent Voices by
Some of the greatest English novels were written during the Victorian era, and many are still widely read and taught today. But many others written during that period have been neglected by scholars and modern readers alike. A number of these novels were written by women and were popular when published. Moreover, they reveal perspectives of 19th-century British culture not present in canonized works and therefore revise our understanding of Victorian life and attitudes. With the increasing interest in revising Victorian history and gender scholarship, especially through the rediscovery of lost texts written by women, this book is a timely and much needed study. The expert contributors to this volume argue the value of novels by such Victorian women writers as Grace Aguilar, Catherine Crowe, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Annie E. Holdsworth, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Flora Annie Steel, Anne Thackeray, Sarah Grand, Marie Corelli, and others. Most of the chapters address numerous works by a particular writer. Each focuses on different social issues as well, though most of them share an interest in gender politics. Topics discussed include a 19th-century Jewish novelist's navigation through Protestant spirituality, the relationship of noncanonical governess novels to class and gender issues, and forgotten works by women crime writers. Other chapters analyze how women writers impelled social reform and subverted patriarchally defined religious issues.
Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers by
Queens, by definition, embody a historical contradiction between femininity and power. Queen Victoria, whose strength and longevity defined an age, possessed immense cultural as well as political power, even becoming a writer herself. This cultural sovereignty, argues Gail Turley Houston, in the hands of a female monarch troubled writers, especially men, who worked during a reign that viewed women as domestic angels. By exploring a wide range of representations of the queen by significant Victorian writers, Houston points out the complexity of Victorian constructions of gender, representation, authority, and identity. She works to demystify such canonized authors as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Margaret Oliphant by examining the ways they encounter Victoria in their writings. The queen's feminine power seems to be at odds with the masculine profession of author, which was also coming to be viewed as a significant representative of the culture. Part of the recent movement by feminist scholars to recuperate and analyze Queen Victoria's important meanings in nineteenth-century British culture, Royalties dissects the anomaly of the queen and her effect on dominant cultural attitudes about gender.
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The Columbia History of the British Novel by
A comprehensive survey of the British novel from its origins in the 18th century to the modern day. Organized chronologically, this reference work traces the development of the novel and provides essays on its most illustrious practitioners, from Fielding and Austen to the postmodernists. The contributors challenge contemporary views of the classics by examining canonical writers, as well as women and post-colonial novelists. They also examine subgenres such as picaresque fiction, travelogues, historical romances, detective novels, adventures and the Bildungsroman. Brief biographies of the novelists discussed are given, along with lists for further reading.
Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture by
This book considers the ways in which women writers used the powerful positions of author and editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Societyrespectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship.The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialisation in the periodical press was not just reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they couldtransfer onto other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact, and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy, as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptionalcontrol over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination.By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth centuryto explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the New Woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in theVictorian press and beyond.
Guide originally created by Suhasini Kumar (retired, 2017).
