Selected Bibliography of Materials on Victorian Fiction (to 1990)

Bibliographies of Fiction:

Stevenson, Lionel, ed. Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research. NY: . General materials; Disraeli; Bulwer-Lytton; Dickens; Thackeray; Trollope; the Brontes; Gaskell; Collins; Reade; Eliot; Meredith; Hardy; Moore; Gissing.

Watt, Ian. The British Novel: Scott Through Hardy. Northbrook, Ill.: AHM, 1973. Goldentree bibliographies. Reasonably thorough; includes sections on Eliot, Wood, and Oliphant, but not Schreiner.

Background and Criticism on the Novel:

Alkon, Paul K. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. NY: Twayne, 1994.

Allen, Dennis W. Sexuality in Victorian Fiction. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1994.

Altick, Richard D. The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991.

Ardis, Ann L. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990.

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard, 1982. The mythic female as powerful cultural force.

Baldridge, Cates. The Dialogues of Dissent in the English Novel. Hanover, NH: UP of New England. 1994.

Barreca, Regina. Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1994.

Basch, Francoise. Relative Creatures: Women in Victorian Society and the Novel. NY: Schocken, 1974.

Berman, Jeffrey. Narcissism and the Novel. New York UP, 1990. Discusses Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Jude the Obscure, and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Block, Edwin F., Jr. Rituals of Dis-Integration: Romance and Madness in the Victorian Psychonythic Tale. NY: Garland, 1993.

Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell, 1988. Includes discussion of Frances Trollope, Dickens, C. Bronte, Elizabeth Stone, Jewsbury, Gaskell, and Eliot.

Born, Daniel. The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells. U of North Carolina P, 1995.

Bowers, Bege K., and Barbara Brothers, eds. Reading and Writing Women's Lives: A Study of the Novel of Manners. Ann Arbor: UMI Reasearch P, 1990. Includes Eliot and Trollope.

Bradbury, Malcolm. Dangerous Pigrimage: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel. London: Secker, 1995.

Bristow, Joshph. Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man's World. London: Collins, 1991.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Hatvard UP, 1992. Includes Heart of Darkness and Great Expectations.

Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming A Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. NY: Viking, 1982. Includes chapters on Villette, Daniel Deronda, The Egoist, The Portrait of a Lady, Mrs. Dalloway.

Calder, Jenni. Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford U P, 1976.

Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford UP, 1995. 

Cecil, David. Victorian Novelists: Essays in Reevaluation. U Chicago, 1935. Contains chapters on Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, Gaskell, Trollope, and Eliot.

Childers, Joseph W. Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture. U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. 

Cohen, Monica F. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work, and Home. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Duke UP, 1996.

Cohen, Paula Marantz. The Daughter's Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan  P, 1991.

Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. L: U London, 1970. Linton, Schreiner, Ward, John Hobbes, Vernon Lee.

Colby, Vineta. Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton U P, 1974. Mrs. Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Charlotte Yonge, Harriet Martineau.

Crane, Ralph J. Imagining India: A History of India in English Language Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1992.

Crosby, Christina. The Ends of History: Victorians and "The Women Question." Routledge, 1991. Includes C. Bronte, Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Ruskin, and Thackeray.

Cosslett, Tess. Woman to Woman: Female Friendship in Victorian Fiction. N J: Humanities Press, 1988.

Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-century Grub Street. Cambridge, 1985. Excellent detail on little-known authors; among other topics, contains chapters on "The Labouring Muse" and "The Female Drudge."

Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. N Y: Macmillan, 1978. Meredith, Hardy, Gissing.

Cunningham, Valentine. In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Includes Jane Eyre, Heart of Darkness, Hard Times, and Middlemarch.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. Rutgers UP, 1992.

David, Deirdre, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge U, 2001.

DeCicco, Lynne Marie. Women and Lawyers in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Uneasy Alliances and Narrative Misrepresentation. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1996. 

Dever, Carolyn. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Dickerson, Vanessa D., eds. Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays. NY: Garland, 1995.

Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural. U of Missouri P, 1996.

Donawerth, Jane L. and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Words of Differences. Syracuse UP, 1994.

Drescher, Horst W., and Joachim Schwend, eds. Studies in Scottish Fiction: Nineteeth Century. NY: Lang, 1985. 

Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge UP, 1992.

Feltes, N. N. Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel. U of Wisconsin P, 1993.

Fielding, Penny. Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteeth-Century Scottish Fiction. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996.

Fox, Pamela. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945. Duke UP, 1994.

Fraiman, Susan. Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. Columbia UP, 1993.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale U P, 1979. The great megatext of feminist interpretations, matrix of subversion theory.

Ginsburg, Michal Peled. Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteeth Century Novel. Stanford UP, 1996. 

Gilbert, Pamela K. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Gilmartin, Sophie. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Gilmour, Robin. The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction. L: Edwin Arnold, 1986. Fairly broad coverage, from Bulwer-Lytton to Mary Ward; includes Eliot but not Schreiner.

Goodheart, Eugene. Desire and Its Discontents. Columbia UP, 1991. Includes Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness.

Graham, Kenneth. English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-1900. Oxford U P, 1965.

Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880-1940. Cambridge UP, 1994. Includes Conrad, Gissing, Hardy, Stevenson, Stoker, Wells, and Wilde.

Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of  Travel. Duke UP, 1996.

Guy, Josephine M. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. NY: St. Martin's, 1996.

Hall, Donald E. Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists. London: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's P, 1996.

Harbison, R. D. Industrial Diamonds: The English Proletarian Novel, 1840-1890. Diss., Cornell, 1969.

Harman, Barbara Leah and Susan Meyer, eds. The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Underread Victorian Fiction. NY: Garland, 1996.

Harsh, Constance D. Subversive Heroines: Feminist Resolutions of Social Crisis in the Condition-of-England Novel. U of Michigan P, 1994.

Haywood, Ian, ed. The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction. Aldershot: Scolar P, 1995.

Herdman, John. The Double in Nineteeth-Century Fictioin: The Shadow Life. NY: St. Martin's. 1991. Including Kipling and Stevenson.

Hunt, Linda C. A Woman's Portion: Ideology, Culture, and the British Female Novel Tradition, NY: Garland, 1988.

Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. Routledge, 1996. 

Kayman, Martin A. From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1992.

Keating, P. J. The Working Class in Victorian Fiction.

Keen, Suzanne. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge UP, 1998.

Kestner, Joseph. Protest and Reform: The British Social Narrative by Women, 1827-1867. Madison: U Wisconsin Press, 1985. Gaskell, Craik, Eliot, and Martineau, among others.

Knoepfelmacher, U. C. Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era. Berkeley: U California, 1971. A chapter on Middlemarch.

Krandis, Rita S. Subversive Discourses: The Cultural Production of Late Victorian Feminist Novels. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1995. 

Krasner, James. The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative. Oxford UP, 1992.

Kroeber, Karl. Styles in Fictional Structure. Princeton U P, 1971.

Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Cornell UP, 1994.

Levin, Amy K. The Suppressed Sister: A Relationship in Novels by Nineteeth- and Twentieth-Century British Women. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP; London: Associated UP, 1992. Includes Eliot and Gaskell.

Levin, Richard A., ed. The Victorian Experience: The Novelists. Athens: Ohio U P, 1976. Contains essays on Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, the Brontes, Eliot (on Middlemarch, by Jerome Beaty), Meredith, Hardy, and Gissing.

Litvak, Joseph. Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteeth-Century Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Macovski, Michael. Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse. Oxford UP, 1994. Includes Wuthering Heights and Heart of Darkness.

Maxwell, Richard. The Mysteries of Paris and London. UP of Virginia, 1992.

McClure, John A. Late Imperial Romance. London: Verso, 1994. Includes Conrad, Haggard, and Kipling.

McCormick, Marjorie J. Mothers in the English Novel: From Stereotype to Archetype. NY: Garland, 1991. Includes Dickens, Eliot, and Gaskell.

McMurty, Jo. Victorian Life and Victorian Fiction: A Companion for the American Reader. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979. Emphasizes mid-century novels.

Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction. Cornell UP, 1996.

Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1992.

Michie, Helena. Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Liteature and Culture. Oxford UP, 1992. Includes Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, Tess of D'Urbervilles, and East Lynne.

Miller, Andrew H. Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge UP, 1995. 

Miller, J. Hillis. The Form of Victorian Fiction: Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy. L: U Notre Dame, 1968.

Mills, Sara, and et al. Feminist Readings/Feminist Reading. U of Virginia P, 1989. Includes Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Mitchell, Judith. The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.

Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women's Reading 1835-1880. Bowling Green U Popular Press, 1981.

Monk, Leland. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford UP, 1993.

Morgan, Susan. Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women's Travel Books about Southeast Asia. Rutgers UP, 1996..

Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917. Rutgers UP, 1991. 

Newton, Judith Lowder. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction 1778-1860. Athens: U Georgia, 1981. Contains considerable discussion of Eliot.

Orel, Harold. The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920. London: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1995.

Perera, Suvendrini. Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens. Colulmbia UP, 1991. Includes C. Bronte, Dickens, Gaskell, and Thackeray.

Phelan, James. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. U of Chicago P, 1989. 

Priestman, Martin. Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's. 1990.

Pykett, Lyn. The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. Routledge, 1992.

Ralph, Phyllis C. Victorian Transformations: Fairy Tales, Adolescence, and the Novel of Female Development. NY: Lang, 1989.

Reynolds, Peter, ed. Novel Images: Literature in Performance. Routledge, 1993. Includes Wuthering Heights and Dracula.

Rignall, John. Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator. Routledge, 1992.

Robbins, Bruce. The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below. Duke UP, 1986; rpt. 1993.

Rosen, Michael. The Changing Fictions of Masculinity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in the Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton UP, 1992.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. N Y: Random House, 1978. Discusses European (mis)representations of the Near East, including those by 19th-century British authors.

Sanders, Valerie. Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists. Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1996.

Scheick, Willliam J. Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century English Novel. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990.

-----. The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Inclues Chesterton, Haggard, Kipling, Stevenson, and Wells.

Seed, David, ed. Anticipations; essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Liverpool UP; Syracuse UP, 1995. 

Segal, Naomi. The Adultress's Child: Authorship and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Polity, 1992.

Shaw, Philip and Peter Stockwell, eds. Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day. London: Pinter, 1991.

Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. N Y: Penguin, 1987.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton U P, 1977.

Singley, Carol J. and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993.

Small, Helen. Love's Madness: Medicine: the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865. Oxford UP, 1996.

Stewart, Garrett. Death Sentences: Style of Dying in British Fiction. 1984. 

Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Stubbs, Patricia. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, 1880-1920. Brighton: Harvester, 1979. Includes chapters on Hardy, Moore and Meredith, Feminist Fiction (Schreiner, Grand, Egerton, brief on all), Wells.

Swindells, Julia. Victorian Writing and Working Women. Minneapolis: U Minnesota, 1985. Includes George Eliot, Gaskell, working women autobiographers.

Sypher, Eileen. Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel. London: Verso, 1993. Includes Conrad, Gissing, Hopkins, Morris, Shaw, and Wells.

Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. Includes Conrad, Doyle, and Kipling.

Thompson, Nicola Diane. Reading Sex: Gender and the Reception of Victorian Novels. New York UP, 1996. 

Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford, 1954. Mary Barton, Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre.

Tobin, Beth Fowkes. Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860. Yale UP, 1993.

Turner, Martha A. Mechanism and the Novel: Science in the Narrative Process. Cambridge UP, 1993.

Tuss, Alex J. The Inward Revolution: Troubled Young men in Victorian Fiction, 1850-1880. NY: Lang, 1992. Includes Braddon, Dickens, Elioit, C. Kingsley, and Wilde.

Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Weekes, Ann Owens. Unveiling Treasures: The Attic Guide to the Published Works of Irish Women Literary Writers: Drama, Fiction, Poetry. Dublin: Attic, 1993.

Williams, Merwyn. Women in the English Novel, 1850-1900. 1984.

Winnifrith, Tom. Fallen Women in the Nineteeth-Century Novel. Basingstoke: Macmillan; NY: St. Martin's, 1994. Includes C. Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Thackeray.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992.

Wolstenholme, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. Includes C. Bronte and Eliot.

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. U of Chicago P, 1991. 

York, R. A. Strangers and Secrets: Communication in the Nineteeth-Century Novel. London: Associated UP; Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994.

Books on George Eliot:

Allen, Walter. George Eliot. N Y: Macmillan, 1964.

Atkins, Dorothy. George Eliot and Spinoza. U Salzburg, 1978.

Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot. Oxford U P, 1983. Past Masters Series. Brief but good.

Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860. Cambridge, 1980.

Beaty, Jerome. 'Middlemarch' from Notebook to Novel. Urbana, Illinois, 1960.

Benet, Mary Kathleen. Writers in Love. N Y: Macmillan, 1977. Contains section on Eliot and Lewes.

Bennett, Joan. George Eliot: Her Mind and Art. Cambridge U P, 1966.

Carroll, David, ed. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. London, 1971. A collection of essays.

Cross, J.W. George Eliot's Life. London: Blackwood's, 1887.

Haight, Gordon S., ed. A Century of George Eliot Criticism. London, 1966. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism.

Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. Oxford U P, 1968. The standard scholarly, pre-feminist biography.

Haight, Gordon S., ed. Selections from George Eliot's Letters. Yale U P, 1985. A fine account of her life in its own right.

Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot. Oxford U P, 1959.

Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. 3rd ed. NY: NYU, 1967. Includes famous chapter on Daniel Deronda.

Penney, Thomas, ed. Essays of George Eliot. London, 1963.

Pinion, F. B., ed. A George Eliot Miscellany: A Supplement to Her Novels. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.

Redinger, Ruby V. George Eliot: The Emergent Self. London, 1975. Psychological interpretations of her life.

Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives. 1983. Contains chapters on Dickens and Lewes.

Sanders, Andrew. The Victorian Historical Novel, 1840-1880. London, 1979. Contains an account of Romola.

Shaffer, E. S. 'Kubla Khan' and the Fall of Jerusalem. Cambridge U P, 1975. Places Daniel Deronda in the context of German biblical criticism.

Sutherland, A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London, 1976. Contains chapter on the publication of Middlemarch.

Uglow, Jenifer. George Eliot. London: Virago, 1987. Incisive, selective, feminist biography.

Works on Olive Schreiner:

First, Ruth and Ann Scott. Olive Schreiner: A Biography. N Y: Schocken, 1980.

Schreiner, Olive. Letters, Volume I, 1871-1899, ed. Richard Rive. Oxford U P, 1987.

Other Women Prose Writers 1860-1900:

Caird, Mona. The Wing of Azrael, 1889. The Daughters of Danaeus. L, 1894.

Clapperton, J. H. Margaret Dunmore: Or, A Socialist Home. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888.

Cullwick, Hannah. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. and intro. Liz Stanley. Virago, 1984.

Egerton, George (Mary Dunne). Keynotes, 1893.

Ford, Isabella O. On the Threshold. London: Edward Arnold, 1895. Independent women attempt to live alone and fight convention.

Lee, Vernon. Supernatural Tales: Excursions into Fantasy. London: Peter Owen, 1987.

Oliphant, Margaret. The Autobiography of Mrs. Oliphant, arranged and edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill. Forward by Laurie Langbauer. Chicago: U Chicago, 1988. Prolific novelist of period, author of Hester, Kirsteen and many others.

Ward, Mary Augusta. Robert Elsmere, L, 1888. Marcella. L: 1894. Helbeck of Bannisdale. L, 1898.

Wood, Mrs. Henry. East Lynne, ed. Sally Mitchell. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 1984.