This five-volume series British Women's Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury 1840-1940
historically contextualizes and traces developments in women's fiction from 1840 to 1940.
Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women's writing decade by decade
it redefines the landscape of women's authorship across a century of dynamic social and
cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades the series is wide in scope
but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by
historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women's writing distinctly within the
1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary
history feminist approaches disability studies and the history of reading the volume's 16
original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition
the politicization of the domestic sphere and the development of crime and sensation writing.
Centrally it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they
first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary
landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.
