Nina Auerbach

Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Nina Auerbach locates vampires at the heart of national experience and uses them as a lens for viewing the last 200 hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history.

Our Vampires, Ourselves

As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie's adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti's unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age. "Forbidden Journeys is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies."—United Press International "A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children's literature and to children."—Beverly Lyon Clark, Women's Review of Books "These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . Forbidden Journeys is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors' intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres

Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers

Forbidden Journeys

Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature

The Life of a Victorian Myth

Woman and the Demon

Here is a bold new vision of Victorianculture: a study of myths of womanhoodthat shatters the usual generalizationsabout the squeezed, crushed, and ego-less Victorian woman. Through copious examples drawn fromliterature, art, and biography, Auerbachreconstructs three central paradigms:the angel/demon, the old maid, and thefallen woman. She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of amobile female outcast with divine anddemonic powers. Fear of such disruptive, self-creating figures, Auerbach argues, produces the approved ideal of thedutiful, family-bound woman. The awethey inspire associates them with characters in literature, the only vehicles ofimmortality in whom most Victorianscould unreservedly believe. Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety ofsources: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud;poets and major and minor novelistsCarlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Ruskin;lives of women, great and unknown;Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalenhomes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre- Raphaelite paintings and contemporarycartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies, she demonstratesthat female powers inspired a vivid mythcentral to the spirit of the age.

"Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers--but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal. In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle--childhood, passage to maturity, and death--she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination. Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality---whether private or on the stage.

The Lives of the Victorians

Private Theatricals

U. C. Knoepflmacher

This “darkly entertaining” story collection is “a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies" (United Press International). In the 1870s and 1880s, children’s literature saw some astonishingly bold and innovative writing by women authors. As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one that was startlingly subversive for its time. While writers such as Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie wrote nostalgic tales that pined for lost youth, their female counterparts had more serious—at times unsettling—concerns. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s adaptations of "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" to Christina Rossetti’s unsettling anti-fantasies in Speaking Likenesses, the stories collected here are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary works of fiction, full of strange delights for readers of any age. "The editors’ intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy."—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres

Examines the life and work of the English novelist and discusses the influence of her famous father and grandfather on her writing.

Daphne Du Maurier, Haunted Heiress

Nina Auerbach brilliantly reveals the Ellen Terry whose roles, on stage and off, embodied everything that a rapidly changing world exhorted women to be.

Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time

Nina Auerbach examines both the life of Daphne du Maurier as it is revealed in her writings and the sensibility of a vanished class and a time now gone that haunts the fringes of our own age.

Nina Auerbach

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