While England has been strengthened by a proud isolationism, she has simultaneously been enriched by the economic, social, and political complexities that have emerged as people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds have moved within her borders, or when her own citizens have emigrated among those foreigners to live or rule. This book explores the foreign element in English culture and the attempt by English writers from the early 19th to the mid 20th century to portray their complex and often ambiguous responses to that doubly foreign element among them: the foreign woman. While being foreign may begin with national or ethnic difference, the contributors to this book expand it to include other forms of alienation from a dominant culture, resulting from gender, race, class, ideology, or temperament. The many factors shaping English national identity--including British imperialism, immigration patterns, English family and social structures, and English common law--have been shaped by gender-related issues. Though not a prominent literary figure, the foreign woman in England has received increasingly critical attention in recent years as a psychological and sociological phenomenon. By beginning with Byron in the early 19th century and concluding with Lawrence Durrell in the 20th century, this study contributes to a more comprehensive vision of the foreign woman as she is portrayed by a number of British authors, including Shelley, Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Anita Brookner.

This collection of all new essays seeks to answer a series of questions surrounding the Victorian response to poverty in Britain. In short, what did various layers of society say the poor deserved and what did they do to help them? The project is organised against the backdrop of the 1834 New Poor Laws, recognising that poverty garnered considerable attention in England because of its pervasive and painful presence. Each essay examines a different initiative to help the poor. Taking an historical tack, the essayists begin with the royal perspective and move into the responses of Church of England members, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics; the social engagement of the literati is discussed as well. This collection of essays reflects the real, monetary, spiritual and emotional investments of individuals, public institutions, private charities, and religious groups who struggled to address the needs of the poor.