Elizabeth barrett browning's relation to her female predecessors was complex, conflicted, and rewarding. In Aurora Leigh we see both the heroine and her creator grow from poets who attempt to prove themselves in traditionally masculine terms, into poets who engage with a feminine tradition of sentimental verse which they resist and criticize but nevertheless find of essential value. Only by viewing the poem against the backdrop of the sentimental tradition can we fully appreciate Barrett Browning's challenge to the cult of privacy and the doctrine of separate spheres, her dual emphasis on poetry as at once a job requiring doggedness and a vocation requiring wide social and religious vision, and, finally, her sense of the connection between herself and her female predecessors. Such poets as Felicia Hemans and L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon) stand in a relation to Barrett Browning which resembles the unsentimental aunt's relation to Aurora in Book 1 of Aurora Leigh: there is more conflict than sympathy in the relationship; the older woman represents a version of femininity which the younger must at all costs resist; and yet the older woman leaves the younger a legacy which is both narrow and enabling, an essential basis for the young poet's future achievement.

George eliot's felix holt the radical discusses a figure of enormous importance in the social history of Britain and the United States: the labor pioneer, that is, the person who consciously dedicates his or her whole life to long-term activity in the working class. Eliot, I argue, is the first important writer to recognize the significance of this figure and invest it with moral value. In doing so, she upends the tradition bequeathed by earlier “industrial novels” by recognizing, along with the labor pioneer, the permanence of class divisions and the political independence of the working class. Further, in heroizing the figure who struggles for the future of a new social class, Eliot departs from the reliance on “the authority of the past” or the stress on culture in general that have been seen as keys to her work.

Wuthering heights is haunted, of course. But not only by the ghost of Catherine, who harries Heathcliff and terrifies Lockwood. Not only by the shades of Heathcliff and Catherine (or Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) who set off toward Penistone Crag. The ghosts in Wuthering Heights are not Gothic ghosts nor the ghosts from Victorian magazine ghost stories. They represent a different kind of haunting altogether — the haunting of the Victorian middle classes by fear of the people they designated as “the folk.”

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

Margaret atwood's narrator in Bodily Harm, reminiscing about her childhood, says: “I learned to listen for what wasn't being said, because it was usually more important than what was” (55). Making a similar point, in The History of Sexuality Foucault writes that “There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (1: 27). If we read David Copperfield in this way — listening to the silences, as well as attending closely to what is being said — the narrative which emerges from the surface bildungsroman is very different from the traditional story of David who learns that “there can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose,” and that his marriage to Dora was “the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart” (ch. 45; 733). In this surface narrative David, suitably chastened, is released to marry the boring Agnes by the fortuitous death of the unfortunate Dora. Many critics have commented wisely on David's emotional and psychological development. What I want to suggest is that, while the surface story traces the disciplining of David's emotions, there is another narrative which tells of a different kind of disciplining, one that subjects David to a variety of social norms, rules, and regulations.

“Kan kunst de wereld redden?” When Antwerp was cultural capital of Europe in 1993, this question — “Can art save the world?” — was adopted as one of the city's official slogans, prompting the mayor at the time, Bob Cools, to offer his contribution to an answer by way of a quotation: “Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.” As his source Cools mentioned Literature and Dogma, but in order to register accurately the phrase's critical relation to the salvation of and by culture, we must at least retrace it to its origin in Arnold's work, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In that essay, Arnold famously argues for the logical priority of criticism over poetry, claiming that poetry can only thrive when it has at its disposal the “materials” of literary creation, the high-quality “ideas” which it is the province of criticism to furnish (270).” The business of criticism is “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas” (270). Measured by this standard, Arnold finds his own English modernity sadly deficient, representative of “the modern situation in its true blankness and barrenness, and unpoetrylessness” (Letters 126), and bereft of “just that very thing which now Europe most desires, — criticism” (“Function” 258). For in England, more than anywhere else, the critical spirit suffers from the short-sighted pragmatism and innate mindlessness that render the British immune to ideas, a fundamental philistinism that deprives the creative faculty of its materials and stifles the genuine development of criticism according to “the idea which is the law of its being: the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas” (“Function” 282).

In an uncharacteristic burst of rhetoric and emotion, the 1849 Select Committee on Public Libraries implored:

Shall we therefore abandon the people to the influence of a low, enfeebling, and often pestilential literature, instead of enabling them to breathe a more pure, elevated, and congenial atmosphere? (viii)

The means of bringing about such a literate atmosphere was the funding of a system of public libraries, institutions freely open to all, but especially aimed at working-class readers. These institutions would provide access to books unavailable to the working-class reading public. In providing such access, the libraries were also to ensure that books would be free of the “pestilential” influences of the “low” kinds of texts commonly available to the working class. The public library was thus to purify, elevate, and disinfect working-class reading.

Although long slighted by critics, Lovel the Widower should be recognized as the most overtly theatrical work we have from one of the nineteenth century's most theatrical writers. Adapted for the Cornhill Magazine from Thackeray's failed drama, The Wolves and the Lamb, Lovel is narrated by a character who calls himself the “Chorus of the Play” and tells the story of a governess who must hide the fact that she was once an actress. Thackeray published the story to keep the Cornhill's readers entertained while he began work on his last completed novel, The Adventures of Philip. As a piece of occasional journalism, Lovel therefore shares a closer kinship with Thackeray's other periodical writings and Christmas books than it does with his mature novels. Not destined to be the newly-launched Cornhill's chief fictional attraction (that honor went to Trollope's Framley Parsonage), Lovel actually functioned in the magazine as the literary equivalent of a theatrical comic afterpiece.

On August 3, 1860 Dickens wrote to his friend Bulwer Lytton asking whether he might be prepared to contribute “a tale” to All the Year Round. The inquiry was speculative, but prompted by characteristic editorial foresight. The magazine's current serial, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, was nearing completion, Charles Lever's A Day's Ride was waiting to take over from it, and Dickens himself was beginning to contemplate a new novel which, as Great Expectations, was subsequently issued between December 1860 and August 1861. Evidently he was already thinking of their successor, and clearly he recognized that Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, ex-cabinet minister and pillar of the literary establishment, would be a real catch. Bulwer did not reply immediately, though he was in fact already making preliminary sketches for the novel that would become A Strange Story. The idea for the book had come to him in a dream (as, twenty years earlier, had that for his other great tale of the supernatural, Zanoni), and as it developed during the summer of 1860 it gradually supplanted his other work in progress — the historical novel of ancient Greece Pausanias the Spartan (eventually published posthumously in 1876, still incomplete). In October 1860, while vacationing in Corfu, he noted ruefully that his “mystic story” was at a standstill, but on his return to England the following month he was sufficiently encouraged to respond, at least tentatively, to Dickens's inquiry.

In 1862 parliament deliberated the Lunacy Regulation Bill, which stipulated that medical testimony keep to the broad road of “fact” and not stray into the crooked alleyways of speculative “opinion.” During its debates, the House of Lords sometimes sounded like a parliamentary annex of Punch, or of Swift's Academy of Projectors. Decrying how “the very idea of a mad doctor's examination has become a by-word,” the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) and the Earl of Shaftesbury furnished anecdotes pointing to which way forensic madness lies: in the neighborhood of the lunacy expert who pronounced a fashionable lady deranged for sporting a dagger (“Dear me,” she protested, “if I am insane for that reason, nine-tenths of the ladies in Paris are insane too”); the eminent physician who detected incipient madness in a four-year-old whose cranium exceeded the sanity standard by ½″; the learned gentleman who diagnosed “fatuity and mania” in a female defendant because she could not tell “how much £100 a year was a week,” an impromptu sum which also flummoxed its proposer (“Don't be nervous,” coaxed the cross-examining counsel, “how much is it?”). While no one advocated barring the testimony of medical men entirely, many were reluctant to grant too much influence to paid witnesses interested in advertising expertise, and whose professional bonnets, it would appear, buzzed with their own pet-theoretical bees. The legal distinction between sanity and insanity was not to be drawn lightly for in many respects it was a property line, the critical boundary between free agency and economic wardship. The pertinent questions, argued the Economist, were simply two: “Is A B fit to manage his money? Did A B commit a particular act with … a knowledge that it was wrong, or did he not do it?” As Lord Westbury noted, medical opinion could confuse these issues because doctors and lawyers share deceptively similar terms of art — “lunacy,” “imbecility,” “unsoundness” — but apply them differently and according to incompatible evidentiary procedures. Medicine considers insanity as a matter of disease, he asserted; the law, as a matter of “fact.” In its efforts to serve justice by excluding quackery, the House of Lords burnished its own legislative authority by portraying medicine as self-interested and compromised by multiple interpretive perspectives, and by characterizing the law, by contrast, as reliably linked to empirical fact. What from afar might look like a seamless medico-juridical institution is in truth scored with hairline fractures, if not sizable rifts.

What has come to be called reader-response criticism and theory was ascendant within literary studies in the 1970s and eighties but seems to have waned in the nineties. Edited collections such as Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman's The Reader in the Text and Jane Tompkins's Reader-Response Criticism, both published in 1980, continue to be important references and are still cited frequently. Comparable edited collections published in the nineties, though, such as James Machor's Readers in History (1993) and Andrew Bennett's Readers and Reading (1995) have not received the attention of the earlier collections, and most of the essays in Readers and Reading are reprints of articles published in the eighties. Individuals associated with the reader-response movement such as Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Wolfgang Iser continue to publish books, although these books do not necessarily focus on reading. The journal that I co-edit, Reader, which originated as a newsletter in 1976 as a result of an MLA session on reading that attracted hundreds of people, continues. It remains, though, one of a small number of journals devoted to reading and readers aimed at a university-level audience.

There has been an intriguing range of material published concerning Victorian painting since Victorian Literature and Culture last offered an assessment of the field. These books, including exhibition catalogues, monographs, and collections of essays, represent new and important sources for research in Victorian art and its cultural contexts. Most striking of all during this interval has been the range of exhibitions, from focus on the Pre-Raphaelites to major installations of such Victorian High Olympians/High Renaissance painters as Frederic, Lord Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Included as well have been exhibitions with a particular focus, such as that on the Grosvenor Gallery, and the more broadly inclusive The Victorians held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this last being the most appropriate point of departure to assess the impact of Victorian art on the viewing public in the States.