Anne Brontë

Josephine McDonagh

The tenant of Wildfell Hall

Drawing not only on her works of fiction but also on her poetry, letters and critical works, Josephine McDonagh investigates the ways in which Eliot's works both participate in and criticise Englishness.

George Eliot

Roger Luckhurst

"Transactions and Encounters" brings together essays by leading scholars exploring the complex interface of culture and science in the Victorian era.

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

Transactions and Encounters

Since the publication of her first full length novel, Adam Bede, in 1859 George Eliot has enjoyed the reputation of the greatest realist novelist in English and as the guardian of traditional English values. But the way in which her works have been understood has changed dramatically in the light of shifting trends in literary criticism. In this new study, which draws on the findings of recent literary scholarship, Josephine McDonagh shows how Eliot needs to be recognized, not as an uncritical traditionalist, but as a writer who examined the processes of social and cultural change from the stand point of the progressive intellectual culture of her time. In her works, Eliot wove together issues and ideas taken from a broad range of contemporary fields - science, medicine, philosophy, and social theory. This study provides an accessible and informative analysis of Eliot's techniques as a realist writer in the context of the dynamic intellectual culture of mid-Victorian England.

Joseph Bristow

This book takes a fresh look at the progressive interventions of writers in the nineteenth century. From Cobbett to Dickens and George Eliot, and including a host of lesser known figures – popular novelists, poets, journalists, political activists – writers shared a commitment to exploring the potential of literature as a medium in which to imagine new and better worlds. The essays in this volume ask how we should understand these interventions and what are their legacies in the twentieth and twenty first centuries? Inspired by the work of the radical literary scholar, the late Sally Ledger, this volume provides a commentary on the political traditions that underpin the literature of this complex period, and examines the interpretive methods that are needed to understand them. This timely book contributes to our appreciation of the radical traditions that underpin our literary past.

Nineteenth-Century Radical Traditions

'he looked up wistfully in my face, and gravely asked - "Mamma, why are you so wicked?"' The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips. Living under an assumed name, 'Helen Graham' is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence. Her diary entries reveal the shocking world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled. Combining a sensational story of a man's physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Brontë's optimistic belief in universal redemption. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Brontë's novel scandalized contemporary readers. It still retains its power to shock.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Lecturer School of English and American Studies Josephine McDonagh

Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900

Colin Jones

Jon Mee

A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of Dickens’s most popular texts. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this new collection of essays examines the origins of Dickens vision of the French Revolution, the literary power of the text itself, and its enduring place in British culture through stage and screen adaptations.

Josephine McDonagh

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