Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in 1811 but did not publish it until 1814. With this, the penultimate novel published during her lifetime, she focused on financially comfortable small communities of individuals, raising the quotidian to a level of… Read More ›
Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps. A narrator that readers… Read More ›
First serialized in Robin Goodfellow and then in The Sixpenny Magazine, Mary Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret, became an instant hit with the reading public, if not with critics. In its year of publication in volume form, 1862,… Read More ›
Anna Marie Porter’s novel of the French Revolutionary War, The Hungarian Brothers, proved her most popular romance. It either delighted or repulsed readers in later centuries, depending on their fondness for the genre. One contemporary review of the novel read,… Read More ›
Charles Reade, a playwright as well as a novelist, became well known for his attacks against human injustice and his pleas for compassion through his fiction, of which Griffith Gaunt became a strong example. Reade’s fiction proved melodramatic and dealt… Read More ›
Emily Lawless’s fourth novel, Grania: The Story of an Island, published in two volumes, was eagerly awaited by her readership. Like her third novel, Hurrish (1886), Grania focused on a poor Irish family and was intent on leading its readers… Read More ›
The story of the events that led Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story is now almost as well known as the plot itself. The tale began to take shape in 1816 as a result of ghost-story-telling sessions held among… Read More ›
When Robert Buchanan wrote Foxglove Manor, he had experienced years of poverty, worsened by the illness of his wife. Her death in 1881 followed the failure of his journal, Light, leaving him penniless and desperate for funds. In order to… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December… Read More ›
George Moore’s novel Esther Waters proved his most successful work. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the hardships of a servant girl departed from the oversentimentality by which much Victorian fiction, and some of Moore’s earlier works, were marked. According to… Read More ›
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity. In doing so, he satirized himself. He felt he… Read More ›
Like her first novel, Self Control (1810), Mary Brunton’s second novel, Discipline, remains most important for its contribution to the development of silver-fork fiction and the manners novel, later made most famous by Jane Austen. Didactic in nature, the novel… Read More ›
Mona Caird revealed her strong feminist leanings in all her writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Her 1894 novel, Daughters of Danaus, contained all the themes she stressed in her essays, including a need for female independence, both physical and emotional,… Read More ›
Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages, represented the labor of two years. Reade was hired in 1859 by the publishers of Once a Week to help that periodical compete with… Read More ›
While not considered among Charles Reade’s major works, Christie Johnstone provides a delightful insight into his sense of humor. Not only does the novel’s subject matter entertain, but its format also proves of interest, as Reade designed some chapters as… Read More ›
Serialized between January 1864 and August 1865, Anthony Trollope’s first in his Palliser series, Can You Forgive Her? proved instantly popular. Based on reworked material from his failed comedy The Noble Jilt, its plot focuses on Victorian discontent with social… Read More ›
Henry Rider Haggard wrote Allan Quatermain as a sequel to his popular first novel, King Solomon’s Mines (1885). An instant best-seller, it appeared as a serial in Longman’s Magazine between January and August of 1887. As a young fan, Winston… Read More ›
Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that… Read More ›
When Amelia Opie (1769-1853), the most popular novelist of her day, decided to write Adeline Mowbray, based loosely on the tumultuous public relationship of her acquaintances William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she signaled readers with her subtitle that the female… Read More ›
Women’s social movements in the United States can be divided into three “waves” (although these divisions are not strictly chronological or oppositional). First-wave feminism emerged from the involvement of women activists in the antislavery, temperance, and women’s-suffrage movements in the… Read More ›
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