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.

The figure of darwin hovered like a specter over the fin de siècle, not only the Darwin of the explosive 1859 On the Origin of Species that redirected evolutionary thinking but also the author of the 1871 Descent of Man — a less heralded work, though generating equally significant repercussions with its pronouncements on the intellectual capacities of the sexes. By linking a perceived mental inferiority of women to the mechanism of evolution, Darwin seemingly brought scientific proof to support a cultural truism. In so doing, he reinforced Victorian strictures that maintained women in a subservient state, which now could be justified on the basis of biological determinism. Yet Sarah Grand's popular 1897 novel, The Beth Book, contests the Darwinian verities, questioning the scientists' specious conclusions about sex-linked traits and identifying culture as an equally significant force determining the mental dispositions of the sexes.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Specimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism does mention The Heptalogia in the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogia and his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention to The Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.

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.

The second chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a metaphor that is worth considering: “The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke” (17; ch. 2). The “crevices of the canvas” are, in my opinion, emblematic of the breach by which Henchard has just severed the bonds between himself and humankind. Not only has he shaken loose from his wife, he has also, more importantly, discarded his own daughter. As Elaine Showalter has pointed out, the sale of the child brings to the fore the question of paternity; Henchard has broken the symbolic chain which connected him to both his ancestors and his offspring, and he re-enters society alone, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (57). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, as Jan Gordon observes, a similar rupture affects historical continuity (366). The pointed shaft of the mail-cart piercing the breast of the unhappy horse, Prince, and releasing a flood of blood that cannot be staunched, represents that breach metaphorically. In the two novels, Hardy deals with a breach in the succession of generations and the subsequent impossibility to re-unite what has been sundered. In both stories, a missing link in a chain of symbolic transmission sets off a tragic process that will end only with the death of the heroes.

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.”

Victorian ambivalence toward Romanticism is expressed with alternating vehemence and reticence. Repudiating “the noise / And outcry of the former men” who “left their pain” for Victorian generations (“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” 127–28, 131), in his critical essays Arnold nevertheless reiterates respect for Wordsworth, and in “Dover Beach” he incorporates the free-associationist structure of Coleridge' conversation poems. In Hard Times, the rural world beyond Coketown and Blackpool' gospel of the holiness of the heart constitute Dickens' consolations for the hellish industrial wasteland, but at the same time Harthouse — personifying the empty prodigality and flashy decadence that Victorians saw in Byron and Shelley — subverts moral order. Browning, though warning against the self-defeating diffidence and isolation of the Romantic artist in “Andrea del Sarto,” reaffirms Romantic individuality of vision and rebellion against tradition in “Fra Lippo Lippi.” While venerating the Goethe who proclaimed aspiration for infinitude and extension of the limits of possibility, Carlyle sees Lord Byron as the personification of moral and psychic pathology — unreined sorrow and cynicism, world weariness and decadent hedonism, derisive mockery and pessimism, high-strung sensitivity and emotional vulnerability — defects which Carlyle also sees as immanent in Shelley and which are subsumed in the Victorians' image of the negative side of the Romantics:

Poor Shelley always is a ghastly object: colorless, pallid, tuneless, without health or warmth or vigour, the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to sing to us; the temperament of him, spasmodic, hysterical, instead of strong or robust — a man infinitely too weak for that solitary scaling of the Alps. (Reminiscences 2: 292–93; qtd. in Buckley 22)

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.

It has not passed unnoticed that the courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett coincides with Barrett's ambivalent fascination for mesmerism. But what has not been explicated is the interrelationship between mesmeric agency, the courtship correspondence, and Barrett's autobiographical Sonnets from the Portuguese. Daniel Karlin has suggestively described Barrett's representation of her suitor as an erotic mesmerist, to Browning's discomfort, but Karlin assumes the familiar stereotype of mesmeric power as an unproblematic operation of a dominant male practitioner upon a passive female patient. This essay critiques such an assumption, and suggests that a revised model of mesmeric influence helps elucidate not only Barrett's representation of the courtship in the letters and the Sonnets, but literary influence as well. If Barrett depicts herself in the thrall of a mesmeric agency, then how do we read what is interpreted by feminist critics as her revolutionary active subject position in the Sonnets, which has been taken as the transformation of Victorian women's poetry?

“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).

Henry James's Autobiography recalls a first vision of “vast portentous London” in 1855, and contrasts brother William's boredom to his own imaginative response to the city (Small Boy 157, 170–71). Having moved there, he feels that amid the “London scene” he can fully exercise his “intellectual curiosity,” feeding “on the great supporting and enclosing scene itself” (Middle Years 553, 564). A later announcement to William Dean Howells that “henceforth I must do, or half do, England in fiction” comes as no surprise (Letters 284). James would follow up his intention in half-a-dozen novels, gradually refining the treatment of broad aesthetic, moral, and political issues in The Tragic Muse and The Princess Casamassima to a more specific “form of social-scientific inquiry” into characters and their interactions (Mizruchi 119). The novels written during the last years of Victoria's reign — The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and The Sacred Fount — convey perceptions of crumbling social values, “the lost sense, the brutalized manner” (James, Notebooks 196), through close analysis of individuals' speech, actions, motives, and relationships. Indeed, James held that wider trends were summed up by the differences between the personal traits of Victoria and her heir. After the old queen's death, he voiced misgivings in various letters: whereas she had been “a kind of nursing mother of the land and of the empire,” Edward was “an arch-vulgarian,” whose accession seemed bound to bring “vulgarity and frivolity” (qtd. in Edel 2: 426). The tone is first gloomy, “It's a new era — and we don't know what it is,” and later resigned: “We live notoriously, as I suppose every age lives, in an ‘epoch of transition’ ” (Preface, Awkward Age 12). A strong conviction that personal and social behavior influence and signify each other informs such comments.

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.

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.

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.

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

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.

A prominent pattern in the weave of Jane Eyre's station, attitudes, and narrative is her finances, skewed by lineage and wont. Jane's fortune and psyche are as warped when she becomes wealthy and a writer as when she was a young, anxious outcast whom poverty demeaned and challenged. Her memoirs critique religious hypocrisy, male chauvinism, and economic degradation, but also expose her pernicious outlook on matrimony and Mammon, in contrast to a proclaimed wedded bliss. “[T]he same catastrophe — marriage” (228; ch. 19) — that she wryly predicts for romances, real and fictional, is a stigma on her character. Jane Eyre records a twisted lesson about an heir straitened by serving too many masters. Jane, knowing she has mistaken wealth for a panacea, not a dangerous pharmakon, is no feminist paragon in a conventional rags-to-riches tale, but rather a disillusioned, haunted woman whose mendacity is a function and mainstay of her knotted, (under)privileged life. When she often wants “a facile word or plausible pretext… to get [herself] out of painful embarrassment” (277–78; ch. 23), candor shades into equivocation. Neither marriage nor writing makes an honest woman of her. Portraying herself as independent and principled, Jane at the end of her narrative rope seems to attain what her cousin, St. John Rivers, calls “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence” (417; ch. 34). However, Jane often feigns placidity, and Ferndean is “deep buried in a wood … [an] ineligible and insalubrious site … no opening anywhere” — which makes her think she “had taken a wrong direction and lost [her] way” (455; ch. 37).