VICTORIAN STUDIES has always been, for me, a form of cultural studies. As early as my sophomore year in college, while reading Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society for a modern humanities course, I was fascinated to learn that a case could be made for the nineteenth century as the period during which notions of culture were constructed. Williams’s work was presented without much contextualization and it was only much later that I came to associate it with either British cultural studies or Marxism. My somewhat unconscious interest in forging connections between culture and politics, which I would argue is the founding mission of cultural studies, was matched by another unconscious interest in Victorian studies, and more specifically, studies of the novel, as a field in which to pursue feminism. By the time I reached graduate school in the 1980s, feminism had become a field and a methodology, and within English departments, Victorian studies produced a rich range of scholars, including Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Nina Auerbach, who dominated the interdisciplinary field of women studies, which, like cultural studies, also sought to explain the relations between culture and politics. Their work on women authors and revising the canon was followed by that of an equally powerful group of feminist Victorianists, including Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Eve Sedgwick, who explored not only how categories of gender and sexuality were integral to nineteenth-century social formations, but how they were invented in the modern period.