Note: The six annotated items below come from a much earlier bibliography on this webpage by Sarah Wilson (Brown University, English 168, 1996). They have been incorporated here for the light they throw on earlier scholarship in this area. — JB
Agnew, Éadaoin. Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India: Representing Colonial Life, 1850-1910. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Ideology of Conduct: essays on literature and the history of sexuality. New York: Methuen, 1987.
This collection of essays explores the issues of sexual behaviour, and women's roles in literature. A good introduction to earlier scholarship in this area.
Barrow, Robin J. "Rape on the Railway: Women, Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers." Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 341–356.
Bashford, Alison. Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine. Macmillan, 1998.
Bilston, Sarah. "Queens of the Garden: Victorian Women Gardeners and the Rise of the Gardening Advice Text." Victorian Literature and Culture . Vol. 36, no. 1 (2008): 1–19.
Black, Barbara J. A Room of His Own : A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Ohio University Press, 2012. [Review} by George Landow]
Boos, Florence. ""Ne'er Were Heroines More Strong, More Brave": Victorian Factory Women Writers and the Role of the Working-Class Poet." Women's Writing, vol. 27, no. 4, Nov. 2020, pp. 428–447.
Brake, Laurel, and Julie F. Codell. Encounters in the Victorian Press : Editors, Authors, Readers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Braun, Gretchen. "'Untarnished Purity': Ethics, Agency, and the Victorian Fallen Woman." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 44, no. 3, Apr. 2015, pp. 342–367.
Briggs, Jo. "Gavarni at the Casino: Reflections of Class and Gender in the Visual Culture of 1848." Victorian Studies, vol. 53, no. 4, Indiana University Press, 2011, pp. 639–664.
Bulamur, Ayşe Naz. Victorian Murderesses : The Politics of Female Violence. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market. Ohio University Press, 2003.
Casteras, Susan P. "Reader, Beware: Images of Victorian Women and Books." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2007.
Daly, Suzanne. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels. University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Danahay, Martin A. Gender at Work in Victorian Culture : Literature, Art and Masculinity. Ashgate, 2005.
Davies, Helen. Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets. Palgrave, 2012.
Delong, Anne. "Haunted Children: Legitimacy, Inheritance, and the Sins of the Fathers in Ghost Stories by Victorian Women." Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. Vol. 137 (2020): 15–29.
Devereux, Jo. "The Evolution of Victorian Women's Art Education, 1858–1900: Access and Legitimacy in Women's Periodicals." Victorian Periodicals Review. Vol. 50, no. 4 (2017): 752–768.
_____. The Making of Victorian Women Artists. McFarland, 2016.
Dickens Studies Annual, 15(1986).
This critical edition contains five individual essays on Great Expectations. To be particularly noted is Flavia Ayala's survey of feminist writing on the Victorians in the fifteen years preceding 1986. Patrick J. McCarthy writes that Ayala reviews the "place, aims, multiplicity, purposes, joys, and self-questioning of the several feminisms that have emerged in the period." (Victorian Studies, 31(1988/89): 453). An interesting survey of feminist thought to explore while considering this topic.
Easley, Alexis. Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, 1850-1914. University of Delaware Press, 2011.
Ehnenn, Jill R. "From 'We Other Victorians' to 'Pussy Grabs Back': Thinking Gender, Thinking Sex, and Feminist Methodological Futures in Victorian Studies Today." Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol. 47, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2019: 35–62.
_____. Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture. Ashgate, 2008.
Fiske, Shanyn. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Ohio University Press, 2008.
Fraser, Hilary, Stephanie Green, and Judith Johnston.Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Frawley, Maria H. A Wider Range : Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Thomas Laquer, eds. The Making of the Modern Body; sexuality and society in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
A collection of essays examining Victorian women in light of cultural criticism and the semiotic approach of that period. Focuses on sexuality within the context of a study of historical and societal paradigms.
"Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art, and Culture [Special Issue]." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Vol. 12, no. 3 (2016).
Golden, Catherine J. Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction. University Press of Florida, 2003.
Gray, Alexandra and Jennifer Diann Jones. "The Female Orphan in Victorian Women's Writing [Special Issue]." Victoriographies: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914. Vol. 9, no. 2 (July 2019): 101–198.
Gray, F. Elizabeth. "'With Thrilling Interest': Victorian Women Poets Report the News." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Vol. 10, no. 2 (2014).
Green, Stephanie. "The Serious Mrs Stopes: Gender, Writing and Scholarship in Late-Victorian Britain." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Vol. 5, no. 3 (2009): 42–.
Griffin, Ben. The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Hall, Catherine, et al. Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hassan, Narin. "Female Prescriptions: Medical Advice and Victorian Women's Travel." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Vol. 5, no. 3 (2009).
Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. "The Victorians, Sex, and Gender." The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture. Edited by Juliet John. Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 161–177.
Herringer, Carol Engelhardt. "Daughters of the Anglican Clergy: Religion, Gender and Identity in Victorian England." Victorian Studies. Vol. 59, no. 1, Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 177–79.
_____. Victorians and the Virgin Mary : Religion and Gender in England, 1830-1885. Manchester University Press, 2008.
Houston, Gail Turley. "Alternative Victorian Religion and the Recuperation of Women's Voices." Literature Compass. Vol. 13, no. 2 (Feb. 2016): 98–107.
_____. Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God. Ohio State University Press, 2013.
Hudgins, Nicole. The Gender of Photography : How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography. Routledge, 2020.
Hughes, Linda K. Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry. Afterword by Isobel Armstrong. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. Routledge, 1996.
_____. Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel, edited by Jordana Pomeroy and Dianne Sachko Macleod, Ashgate, 2005.
Johnston, Judith. Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830-1870. Routledge, 2013.
Kanwit, John Paul M. Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer. Ohio State University Press, 2013.
Killeen, Jarlath. "Gendering the Ghost Story? Victorian Women and the Challenge of the Phantom." The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: A Ghostly Genre. edited by Hellen Conrad O' Briain and Julie Anne Stevens. Four Courts Press, 2010, pp. 81–96.
King, Jeannette. The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Korte, Barbara. "The Promotion of the Heroic Woman in Victorian and Edwardian Gift Books." Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects. Edited by Evanghelia Stead. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 159–177.
Kortsch, Christine Bayles. Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism. Ashgate, 2009.
Kubiesa, Jane M. "The Victorians and Their Fallen Women: Representations of Female Transgression in Nineteenth Century Genre Literature." The Victorian. Vol. 2, no. 2 (2014): 1–12.
Laity, Cassandra. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lambert, C. and M. Shaw, eds. For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women. Routledge, 2017.
Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women's Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. [Review by Kimberly J. Stern]
Leonardi, Barbara. Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Springer International Publishing, 2018.
Liedke, Heidi. The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901. Springer International Publishing, 2018.
Loh, Waiyee. "Japanese Tourists in Victorian Britain: Japanese Women and the British Heritage Industry." Textual Practice. Vol. 34, no. 1 (Jan. 2020): 87–106.
López, Nuria. "British Women versus Indian Women: The Victorian Myth of European Superiority." Myths of Europe, edited by Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, Brill/Rodopi; Weidler; Brill Academic Publishers; Editions Rodopi B.V., 2007, pp. 183–195.
Losano, Antonia. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature. Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Lutz, Deborah. "Erotic Bonds among Women in Victorian Literature." The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature, edited by Bradford K. Mudge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 175–192.
Lysack, Krista. Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women's Writing. Ohio University Press, 2008.
Macdonald, Kate. "Dorothy's Literature Class: Late-Victorian Women Autodidacts and Penny Fiction Weeklies." A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900, edited by Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 23–35.
Mallett, Philip. The Victorian Novel and Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.
Matthews-Jones, Lucinda. "Settling at Home: Gender and Class in the Room Biographies of Toynbee Hall, 1883–1914." Victorian Studies. Vol. 60, no. 1, Indiana University Press, 2017, pp. 29–52.
McNeely, Sarah. "Beyond the Drawing Room: The Musical Lives of Victorian Women." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies. Vol. 5, no. 2 (2009): 18.
Meade, Teresa A., and Merry E. Wiesner. A Companion to Global Gender History. Second Edition., John Wiley & Sons, 2020.
Milne-Smith, Amy. London Clubland : A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Mitchell, Rosemary. "A Tale of Two Ladies? Stuart Women as Role Models for Victorian and Edwardian Girls and Young Women." Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750–1914, edited by Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara Gribling. Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 142–164.
Mitchell, Sally. "New Women, Old and New." Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol. 27, no. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1999: 579–88.
Moine, Fabienne. "Voices in the Machine: Class, Subjectivity and Desire in Victorian Women's Factory Poems/Quand La Machine Parle: Classe, Subjectivité et Désir Dans La Poésie Industrielle Des Victoriennes." Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens: Revue Du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes de l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier. Vol. 87 (2018).
_____. Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Ashgate, 2015.
Muller, Nadine. "Desperately Funny: Victorian Widows & the Comical Misfortunes of Husband Hunting." Journal of Gender Studies. v=Vol. 29, no. 8, Routledge, 2020, pp. 926–36.
Murphy, Patricia. Reconceiving Nature: Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry. University of Missouri Press, 2019.
Newey, Katherine. Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Norwood, Janice, et al. Victorian Touring Actresses: Crossing Boundaries and Negotiating the Cultural Landscape. Manchester University Press, 2020.
O'Cinneide, Muireann. "Wheels Coming off the Empire: Transport, Flight and Gender in Victorian Accounts of the 1857-58 Indian Uprising." Etudes Anglaises: Revue Du Monde Anglophone. Vol. 70, no. 2 (Apr. 2017): 238–248.
Ohri, Indu. "'A Medium Made of Such Uncommon Stuff': The Female Occult Investigator in Victorian Women's Fin-de-Siècle Fiction." Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural. Vol. 8, no. 2 (2019): 254–282.
Olverson, T. Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Palmer, Beth. Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Park, Hyungji. "Empire, Women, and Epistemology in the Victorian Detective Plot." British and American Fiction. Vol. 15, no. 1 (2008): 133–156.
Penner, L. Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale Among the Novelists. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2010.
Peterson, M. Jeanne. Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Peterson's focal point is that there was far greater variety in the lives of Victorian gentlewomen than has been presumed by previous scholars. She uses the paradigms of a few specific examples of upper-middle-class women and their families. One of the most interesting conclusions she reaches is that marriage has been deteriorating since the nineteenth century, and she presents a positive picture of the relationship between husband and wife. Peterson's analysis extends beyond the generalizations frequently prevalent in discussion of the Victorians, and she challenges the stereotype of the weak, passive Victorian woman.
Phegley, Jennifer. "Reading Victorian Valentines: Working-Class Women, Courtship, and the Penny Post in Bow Bells Magazine." Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts. Edited by Anna Maria Jones et al., Ohio University Press, 2017, pp. 269–299.
Pietrzak-Franger, Monika. "Victorian Gender Relations and the Novel." Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900, edited by Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Walter de Gruyter, 2020, pp. 121–148.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: the Ideological Work of Gender in mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
In this book Poovey (one of the most prominent critics in feminist Victorian criticism at the time) discusses sex roles, divorce, and women's societal roles in Victorian England.
Rappoport, Jill. Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Rose, Anita. Gender and Victorian Reform. Afterword by Mary Ellis ibson. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Shires, Linda M. ed. Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
The central issue of this collection of essays is the distribution of social power through various forms of cultural representation, most especially the rising professional middle class and the male/female power dynamic. The essays present details, correctives, and critical applications.
Wagner, Tamara S., ed. Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Cambria Press, 2009.
Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Warhol argues that it is time to unite the formalism of discourse on narrative to feminist-context criticism. She sets up, and demonstrates, the gendered narrative. Dickens, interestingly, is the example of "cross-dressing": in Bleak House he "borrowed" the women's technique of earnest direct address in the episode of Jo's death. Related to the topic only as a thought-provoking piece before addressing Great Expectations.
Zakreski, Patricia, ed. Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain. Foreword by Linda H. Peterson, Ashgate, 2013.
Links to related material
- Women Fiction Writers and the Victorian Gothic: A Selective Bibliography
- Reviews of Recent Scholarship: Gender Matters
Created 18 May 2007
Last modified 28 April 2022