Anna Brownwell Jameson (1794-1869) was a central figure in the London world of letters and art in the early Victorian period, and an important feminist writer. Her friends included such figures as Harriet Martineau, Lady Byron, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This study considers her life and works, using a different Jameson work as the central focus of each chapter. The author considers the particular non-fiction discourse in which the work is written, as well as such issues as gender and colonialism. Arranged chronologically, the book also charts the growth and development of a determined feminism in the vital years of the early Victorian period, and compares Jameson to her contemporaries.

Great Shakespeareans offers a systematic account of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. In this volume, leading scholars assess the contribution of Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Frances Anne Kemble and Charlotte Cushman to the afterlife and reception of Shakespeare and his plays. Each substantial contribution assesses the double impact of Shakespeare on the figure covered and of the figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, provide a sketch of their subject's intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider cultural context, including comparison with other figures or works within the same field.

An examination of women educationists in nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Working with new paradigms opened up by feminist scholarship, it reveals how women leaders were determined to transform education in the quest for a better society. Previous scholarship has either neglected the contributions of these women or has misplaced them. Consequently intellectual histories of education have come to seem almost exclusively masculine. This collection shows the important role which figures such as Mary Carpenter, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Elizabeth Edwards and Maria Montessori played in the struggle to provide greater educational opportunities for women. The contributors are: Anne Bloomfield, Kevin J. Brehony, Norma Clarke, Peter Cunningham, Mary Jane Drummond, Elizabeth Edwards, Mary Hilton, Pam Hirsch, Jane Miller, Hilary Minns, Wendy Robinson, Gillian Sutherland and Ruth Watts.

Offering readings of nineteenth-century travel narratives, works by Tractarians, the early writings of Charles Kingsley, and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, Devon Fisher examines representations of Roman Catholic saints in Victorian literature to assess both the relationship between conservative thought and liberalism and the emergence of secular culture during the period. The run-up to Victoria's coronation witnessed a series of controversial liberal reforms. While many early Victorians considered the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828), the granting of civil rights to Roman Catholics (1829), and the extension of the franchise (1832) significant advances, for others these three acts signaled a shift in English culture by which authority in matters spiritual and political was increasingly ceded to individuals. Victorians from a variety of religious perspectives appropriated the lives of Roman Catholic saints to create narratives of English identity that resisted the recent cultural shift towards private judgment. Paradoxically, conservative Victorians' handling of the saints and the saints' lives in their sheer variety represented an assertion of individual authority that ultimately led to a synthesis of liberalism and conservatism and was a key feature of an emergent secular state characterized not by disbelief but by a range of possible beliefs.

Focusing on an era that both inherited and irretrievably altered the form and the content of earlier art production, The Art-Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850-1880 argues that fine art practices and the audiences and markets for them were influenced by the media culture of art publishing and journalism in substantial and formative ways, perhaps more than at any other time in the history of English art. The study centers on forms of Victorian picture-making and the art knowledge systems defining them, and draws on the histories of art, literature, journalism, and publishing. The historical example employed in the book is that of the more than 800 steel-plate prints after paintings published in the London-based Art-Journal between 1850 and 1880. The cultural phenomenon of the Art Journal print is shown to be a key connector in mid-Victorian art appreciation by drawing out specific tropes of likeness. This study also examines the important links between paint and print; the aesthetic values and domestic aspirations of the Victorian middle class; and the inextricable intertwining of fine art and 'trade' publishing.

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

Examines the history of the governess in nineteenth-century England, using the papers of governesses including Anna Leonowens and the Bronte sisters.