IN OCTOBER 1856, the wife of the Governor General of India noted her satisfaction with recent changes at Government House in Calcutta: “I believe it would look rather nice even as an English country-house, so marvelously is it improved by 450 yards of rose-chintz, a great many arm-chairs, small round tables, drawings etc., and flowerpots in number” (Allen 34). Having arrived in Calcutta in February of that year, Lady Charlotte Canning wasted no time in transporting Victorian upper-class domestic style to a key spot on Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial map. As several recent examinations of the role of Victorian women in the work of empire have shown us, although Lady Canning’s lavish transformation of colonized space into something resembling a Derbyshire drawing-room could not be matched by lower-ranked Englishwomen who accompanied their military and civilian husbands to outposts of empire — 450 yards is a lot of chintz and the Queen had personally despatched some Royal family portraits to Calcutta to assist Lady Canning in her interior decoration — they too did their English domesticating bit. Among other things, these women grew pansies in Simla, served afternoon tea in Ceylon, and arranged croquet parties in Jamaica. They were also faced with less pleasant tasks, as one learns from the memoirs of Harriet Tytler, who accompanied her husband on various military postings in India during the 1840s and 50s. Tytler buried several children, dead of non-treatable illnesses, endured the killing climate of Dacca, and survived the siege of Delhi in 1857.

DESPITE SOME TWENTY YEARS of scholarship in the field, core questions such as “what is a New Woman?” and “what is New Woman fiction?” still remain vexed and all too often need more precise definition. Yet one can say that for all the conflicts of meaning and emphasis between sexual and political, discursive and actual, or caricature and didactic, the feminist rediscovery of the New Woman during the late 1970s has not only opened the canon but has also begun a transformation in the way we understand the entire fin de siècle.

TWO FAIRLY RECENT DEVELOPMENTS have affected our way of producing editions of Victorian letters and of thinking about them. In both theory and practice, however, the two developments pull in opposite directions.

PART OF THE EXCITEMENT of reading Victorian woman’s poetry lies in its manifold refusals to adopt wholesale the codes and conventions of the male poetic tradition. Such refusal may manifest itself in the bold rewriting of forms (as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese), or in the unhinging of domestic or romantic pieties through irony and other doubling strategies (as in Dora Greenwell’s “Scherzo” or Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret”). Both the rewriting of male forms and the attack on conventional ideologies opened up new subject positions for women. For example, women’s responses to poetic tradition and to each other’s work initially made use of expressive theory to explore sexual and religious passions simultaneously (as in the poetry of the Brontës), while towards the end of the century, when religion and sexuality were not so inextricably intertwined, women could openly celebrate non-hierarchical sexualities (as in the lesbian poems of Michael Field).

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:

BSN Browning Society Notes

DAI Dissertation Abstracts International

NCL Nineteenth Century Literature

TLS Times Literary Supplement

VLC Victorian Literature and Culture

VP Victorian Poetry

VR Victorian Review

VS Victorian Studies

An asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).