ABSTRACT
The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding. Not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate. By the time George Eliots second full-length novel, The Mill on the Floss, was being reviewed in 1860, the female identity behind the author's male pseudonym had become common knowledge. Jane Austen emerges from the cluster of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers to be praised for her fictions social observation, and also for its verbal economy in the age of prolix three-deckers.
