Members' Recent Publications

Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice
Diana Bellonby, Nora Gilbert, and Tara MacDonald

Victorian Gaslighting is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938) that tells the story of a sadistic husband who manipulates his wife into believing she’s losing her mind. The collection traces the type of emotional abuse we find in the various stage and screen versions of the play back to its nineteenth-century British roots. Gaslighting emerged during an era when the idea of madness was debated, misused, policed, and medicalized like never before—and when the interlocking institutions of patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism sought to convince women, racialized others, and colonized subjects that their own perceptions were not to be trusted. More than anything, as the volume's wide-ranging analyses of both canonical and little-known Victorian texts demonstrate, gaslighting depends on the power to propagate a false narrative. This study clarifies how gaslighting works, then and now, by taking a deep dive into the distinctly Victorian horror story at the heart of this persistent form of injustice.

Out this month from SUNY Press as part of its “Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century” series (ed. Pamela Gilbert), the hardcover version can be purchased here throughout March at a 30% discount by using the code SWHM26 (in honor of Women’s History Month), and a more affordable paperback version will be out in September.

Diana Bellonby is a Philadelphia-based writer who holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. In 2014, she cofounded The Fringe Foundation for Social Justice and devoted ten years to codirecting its grantmaking operations while continuing her scholarship on Victorian literature, visual culture, and histories of gender and sexuality. Her essays have appeared in such venues as Public Books, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture, and New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions. She is currently working on a memoir that interweaves her own story of sexual trauma with a literary history of rape culture.

Nora Gilbert is Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas, where she co-specializes in Victorian literature and early Hollywood film. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford University Press, 2013); Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023); and articles and book chapters that have appeared in such venues as PMLA, Screen, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Film & History, Victorian Review, Avidly, and Public Books. She has served as the editor of the journal Studies in the Novel since 2017.

Tara MacDonald is Professor of English and Women’s & Gender studies and the Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at the University of Lethbridge. She is the author of Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (Routledge, 2015), as well as numerous articles on nineteenth-century literature, gender, and feminism. She recently coedited a special issue of Studies in the Novel entitled “Strange Temporalities: Gender, Time, and the Novel” and she is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Sensation Fiction.

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
Sara Lodge

Shortlisted for the 2025 Wolfson History Prize

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation

From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves.

Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike.

How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

Link to buy (plus 50% off during the month of November): https://yalebooks.co.uk/the-mysterious-case-of-the-victorian-female-detective

Sara Lodge is senior lecturer in Victorian literature and culture at the University of St Andrews.

The Daughters of Danaus
Mona Caird
Edited by Riya Das

A fully annotated edition of Mona Caird’s immensely successful novel, The Daughters of Danaus, that reframes the novel as a narrative of female professionalisation.

Mona Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus (1894) remains a popular choice among scholars and teachers of nineteenth-century British literature. This is the first critical edition and the first twenty-first century reprint of Caird’s novel with a full editorial apparatus including a critical introduction, notes and appendices. Informed by the novel’s fin-de-siècle context, references to Greek mythology and recent scholarship on Caird and the New Woman, this edition will be beneficial for students and scholars of British and Anglophone literature and gender. Das's critical edition was funded full-time by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant from January through June 2024.

Link to purchase (use the code NEW30 to take 30% off): https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-mona-caird-the-daughters-of-danaus

Riya Das is Assistant Professor of English (British/World Literature) at Prairie View A&M University. Das specializes in nineteenth-century British and Anglophone literature with an interest in gender, empire, and narrative form. Das is the author of Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature (Ohio State UP, 2024), which was funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Her articles have appeared in Victorians Institute Journal, Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom and other venues.

 Violence and the Brontës:
Language, Reception, Afterlives
Sophie Franklin

The well-known and well-loved writings of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are full of violence. From the many battles waged in their early writings to the violent emotions and threats expressed in their published novels, the Brontës’ representations of brutality shocked Victorian reviewers and continue to surprise readers in the twenty-first century. Violence and the Brontës accounts for such intense reactions by reading the sisters’ literary violences as transformational, encompassing harm, pain and suffering while at times also signalling creativity and even renewal. Through a new reading of the Brontës’ major works, as well as film, stage and television adaptations, this book argues that violence is at the centre of the Brontës’ imaginative engagements with nineteenth-century life. In the process, it demonstrates how violence continues to be vital to interpreting the Brontës’ reception history and afterlives in modern culture.

Link to purchase: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-violence-and-the-brontes.html

Sophie Franklin is a DOROTHY MSCA COFUND Postdoctoral Researcher at University College Dublin. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the Twenty-First Century (2016) and co-editor of Consent: Legacies, Representations, and Frameworks for the Future (2023), as well as several articles and book chapters on the Brontës. She is currently an Associate Editor of Brontë Studies.

Care and Disability:
Relational Representations
Edited by D. Christopher Gabbard and Talia Schaffer

Care and Disability is an edited collection offering critical perspectives on representations of care and disability, by emerging and established scholars across multiple periods, regions, and genres of literary studies.

The authors demonstrate the range of fields in which care ethics can elucidate alternative cultural and social dynamics, including Indigenous, African American, and Asian texts, and historical eras that predate the modern medical profession. This collection is committed to drawing out the changing racial, gendered, classed, and sexual elements of care, emphasizing how care communities develop as alternatives to the heteronormative couple and the nuclear family. Drawing from the  care ethics and disability theory, the work in this volume demonstrates the possibilities inherent in this new cutting-edge field.

It will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, care ethics, sociology, narrative medicine, Romanticism, eighteenth-century studies, transatlantic nineteenth-century studies, film, and contemporary race studies.

Link to order: https://www.routledge.com/Care-and-Disability-Relational-Representations/Gabbard-Schaffer

D. Christopher Gabbard is a professor of English at the University of North Florida, whose work focuses on the intersection of disability studies and British eighteenth-century studies.

Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, whose work focuses on gender, disability, and domesticity in the Victorian novel.

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Stefanie Markovits

The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature considers how the avalanche of printed numbers characterizing the period affected its literature. While it touches on the rise of statistics and developments in politics and mathematics, this book takes as its starting point the presence of actual numbers—ordinal and cardinal, Arabic, Roman, or spelled out in words—within the century’s literary texts. It is through the deployment of such figures that texts display their number sense; similarly, readers develop the faculty of number sense by paying attention to their presence. And while it often takes us back to a specific historical context, attention to a text’s use of numbers also enables more fundamental recognitions about how literature makes meaning.

The book asks what kinds of work, intellectual and ethical, literature’s numerical figures perform. Why are some writers especially numbery? What affordances do numbers wield in various literary environments and against a specific historical backdrop? How do they relate to aspects like plot and character, narrative and lyric? How do they interact with seriality, so central to nineteenth-century publication? When do the numbers really count, and when do they ask us to keep count? Lingering over texts’ measures illuminates the way numbers help shape literary works into the recognizable forms we call genres; one marks both lyric and the Bildungsroman but looks very different in each setting. Number sense uncovers how numbers can serve both as valves, releasing cultural pressures, and as fulcrums, places where pressures coincide to create new forms of literary agency.

Stefanie Markovits is a professor of English at Yale University. She researches and teaches literature of the long Nineteenth Century: both Romantic and Victorian, both poetry and the novel. Other areas of interest include German classical literature (especially Goethe and Schiller), aesthetic theory, war and literature, and genre theory.

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Victorian Poetry: An Anthology
Edited by Erik Gray and Veronica Alfano

The first new anthology of its kind in over twenty years, this book includes all the poetry found in the Victorian volume of the Broadview Anthology of British Literature but adds hundreds of new poems and nearly two dozen new poets. It also includes a new introduction, expanded annotation, and a companion website featuring additional poetry, critical prose, and thematic appendices.

Additionally, as a teaching tool that many will find useful, Broadview has made our annotated selection of Hopkins’s poetry freely available online. You can access and download it here.

Erik Gray specializes in poetry, particularly of nineteenth-century Britain. In addition to numerous books, he has published articles on a range of poets, including Homer, Virgil, Sidney, Milton, Pope, and Gray, as well as Romantic and Victorian poets. For many years he has taught Columbia’s introduction to the English major (Literary Texts and Critical Methods), as well as lectures and seminars on nineteenth-century British literature and transhistorical courses on poetry.

Veronica Alfano is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Literature at Macquarie University. She specializes in Victorian poetry and poetics, with particular interests in lyric theory, gender and sexuality, memory, and media studies. Her first book is titled The Lyric in Victorian Memory: Poetic Remembering and Forgetting from Tennyson to Housman; she is currently working on a monograph that examines neologisms in the work of Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, and others. From 2020 until 2023, she led the NAVSA Poetry Caucus. 

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The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession
Sarah Bilston

The forgotten story of a decades-long international quest for a rare and coveted orchid, chronicling the botanists, plant hunters, and collectors who relentlessly pursued it at great human and environmental cost.

In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked―seemingly by accident―in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as “orchid mania” was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the striking purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the most coveted flowers on both continents.

As tales of the flower’s beauty spread through scientific journals and the popular press, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated a massive search to recover it in its natural habitat. Sarah Bilston illuminates the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the “lost orchid.” The dark side of this global frenzy was the social and environmental harm it wrought, damaging fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended.

Following the human ambitions and dramas that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastating power of colonial overreach.

Sarah Bilston is a British author and professor of English literature at Trinity College, Hartford. She currently resides in Connecticut with her husband and three children. She has written four other books: The Awkward Age in Women’s Popular Fiction, 1850-1900, The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture, and two novels, Bed Rest and Sleepless Nights. 

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Temples of Luxury, 2 Vols.
Edited by Susanne Schmid and Lise Shapiro Sanders

This two-volume collection of British primary sources examines institutions such as hotels, inns, arcades, bazaars, co-operatives, shops and department stores in the long nineteenth century, which were often coded as ‘luxurious’. This period was marked not only by an increase of individual consumerism but also by the institutionalisation of opulent, often purpose-built spaces such as the much-admired new grand hotels, supposedly an American invention, and department stores, modelled on the French grands magasins. These environments were tied to leisure (no longer a prerogative of the upper classes) and thus to modernity. In addition to addressing the luxurious side of these institutions, including architectural innovation and interior decoration, we also consider the other side of luxury, examining the experience of staff and period debates over the morality of consumption.

This edition seeks to explore a fascinating but hitherto often neglected side of the British nineteenth century by bringing together a collection of annotated primary texts and visual material documenting these ‘temples of luxury’ as they were seen by their contemporaries.

Dr. Susanne Schmid has taught British literature and culture at several universities, among them FU Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Princeton, Greifswald, Mainz, Salford and Regensburg.

Dr. Lise Shapiro Sanders is Professor of English literature and cultural studies at Hampshire College, MA, USA.

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Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing
Claire Allen-Johnstone

Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing explores the connections between dress, feminism, and New Woman writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on Britain. It reveals how dress, tied to Victorian gender norms and stereotypes, became key in feminist literary culture. Authors and publishers used dress strategically, from cross-dressing storylines and dress-based critiques to fashionable attire. Concentrating on Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, and Grant Allen while bringing in other writers including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the book offers interdisciplinary sartorial biographies, literary interpretation, and analysis of book covers. Through dress it reexamines topics including gender views and the New Woman character, proposing a new approach to feminist writing. This book is essential for those interested in feminist literature, dress history, and gender studies.

Further topics covered by Dress, Feminism, and New Woman Writing include Artistic and Rational dress reform, bicycling, class, pseudonyms, sexuality, the working New Woman, writing style, and the impact of form on writers’ engagement with dress. (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2025)

Claire Allen-Johnstone is an Assistant Curator in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Performance, Furniture, Textiles, and Fashion Department and a Trustee of the Museum of Cambridge.  

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