Queen Victoria's central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays by noted scholars in literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies goes beyond biography and official history to explore the diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings this complex and fascinating figure held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire.

Queen Victoria's central importance to the era defined by her reign is self-evident, and yet it has been surprisingly overlooked in the study of Victorian culture. This collection of essays by noted scholars in literature, cultural studies, art history, and women's studies goes beyond biography and official history to explore the diverse and sometimes conflicting meanings this complex and fascinating figure held for her subjects around the world and even for those outside her empire.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The American edition of the novel, first published by Harcourt Brace in 1927, introduced and annotated by Margaret Homans. • A 1924-28 chronology of To the Lighthouse’s composition, revision, publication and reception. • A rich selection of background materials, thematically organized for ease of reference. Topics include: “Autobiographical Writings,� “Family and Other Contemporary Contexts and Sources,� “Essays by Virginia Woolf,� and “Literary Sources.� • Nine critical assessments of To the Lighthouse, from publication to the present day, by Arthur Sydney McDowell, Louis Kronenberger, Mary Colum, Francis Brown, Erich Auerbach, Adrienne Rich, Rachel Bowlby, Pamela L. Caughie, and Urmila Seshagiri. • A chronology and a selected bibliography

How does the consciousness of being a woman affect the workings of the poetic imagination? With this question Margaret Homans introduces her study of three nineteenth-century women poets and their response to a literary tradition that defines the poet as male. Her answer suggests why there were so few great women poets in an age when most of the great novelists were women.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In "Royal Representations," Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt.
Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model for women's powers in and out of marriage, how Victoria's dramatic public withdrawal after Albert's death helped to ease the monarchy's transition to an entirely symbolic role, and how Victoria's literary self-representations influenced debates over political self-representation.
Homans considers versions of Victoria in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Margaret Oliphant, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Julia Margaret Cameron.

"The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility" addresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption--transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption--that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives.

Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making's special relationship to themes of adoption, an "as if" form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or "real." Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, "adopted children are self-invented because we have to be." In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension.

The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as "Silas Marner," "What Maisie Knew," and "Beloved"); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney's iconic "Mulan," with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades.

This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women's and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.

How does the consciousness of being a woman affect the workings of the poetic imagination? With this question Margaret Homans introduces her study of three nineteenth-century women poets and their response to a literary tradition that defines the poet as male. Her answer suggests why there were so few great women poets in an age when most of the great novelists were women. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.