The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; postcolonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career - from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame - and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown.

'Harmonizing, conflicting, and overlapping in compelling ways, [these scholars'] essays mirror precisely what their work seeks to document - the variegated and sometimes contradictory discourses about Victorian women writers, both in the nineteenth century and today.'

Kimberly J. Stern Source: Review 19 (nbol-19.org)

'A valuable teaching tool and a relevant contribution to the study of gender and literary history. With its impressively wide range of examples of Victorian women writers and their works it reminds us of the immense work still to be done in order to gain a more complex understanding of nineteenth century literature and its institutions.'

Source: Nineteenth Century Gender Studies