British Women’s Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940

This series, published in association with the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers (ICVWW), consists of five volumes of critical essays written by international experts in women’s writing. Structured chronologically, with each volume examining a twenty year timespan, it explores the dynamic contiguities of literary realism, sensation, and the new as a frame for reassessing, decade by decade, how women’s writing changed and developed in Britain from the 1840s to the 1930s.  A transformative period in women’s private, public, and literary lives, the century from 1840 to 1940 saw the rise and fall of the circulating library as an effectual censor of literary expression, the growth and achievements of the female suffrage movement, and a series of legislation that re-envisioned relations within marriage. Female higher education opened and expanded, employment opportunities for women substantially increased, and women’s roles as single women, wives, mothers, and authors were recurrently debated.