The Victorian Novel

Society and Culture in the Times of Elizabeth Gaskell: A Bicentennial Commemorative Volume (Hiroshima: Keisuisya, 2011)

The Victorian Studies Centre has long enjoyed connections to Japanese universities. These links have resulted in a rich tradition of visiting fellowships and translation work. This volume on the novelist and social critic Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, includes an essay by Chieko Ichikawa, visiting fellow at the Centre (‘Prostitution: Body Politics in Chaos’), as well as Ayaka Komiya’s translation of Joanne Shattock’s chapter on ‘Publishing: The Life of a Woman as a Professional Writer’. Gaskell herself remains best known for her novels of British industrial life, Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1853).

Margaret Oliphant, The Perpetual Curate in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1863)

Margaret Oliphant’s literary output was, by any standard, astonishing: she published nearly one hundred novels, numerous short stories, biographies and historical works throughout a writing career that spanned almost fifty years. She forged a strong friendship with the Blackwood family in the early 1850s, an important connection which secured her a number of projects for their publishing house. Oliphant contributed countless articles and literary reviews to Blackwood’s Magazine, as well as her most successful novels, collectively known as The Chronicles of Carlingford.

Ed. Joanne Shattock, The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant, Part IV: The Chronicles of Carlingford, vol. XVII (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014)

The Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant is the most ambitious critical edition of her writing. Part IV offers the first critical edition of the four full-length novels and three stories that comprise The Chronicles of Carlingford. Each of the five volumes contains a full scholarly apparatus, including the important variations between the serial versions and the first publication in volume format.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)

A wide-ranging novelist, journalist and translator, George Eliot was one of the most prominent writers of the nineteenth century. Her works are both politically aware (frequently depicting provincial societies in crisis) and psychologically complex. Daniel Deronda was Eliot’s final, and most controversial, novel. In it she explores an unusual contemporary issue: the status of Jews in British and European society.