Specially commissioned essays offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus rediscovered writers. The specially commissioned essays in Victorian Women Poets, written by scholars from Britain and North America, offer revisionary readings of canonical poets and bring into focus re-discovered writers. The volume both engages critically with the political and aesthetic agenda behind the project of recovery, and also presents a pioneering approach to reading poets who have slipped out of the canon. The work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and ChristinaRossetti is re-assessed and given surprising and innovative literary, political and intellectual contexts that will change the way we interpret their poetry. Writers of emerging significance, such as Theodosia Garrow Trollope, Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field and Margaret Veley, are given prominence in groundbreaking analysis that situates their writing within the wider debates of the period. The themes interwoven throughout the essays - literary history and canonicity, political poetics, nationhood, print culture, and genre - provide a radically new understanding of Victorian women's poetry that maps an agenda for future research. JOSEPH BRISTOW, SUSAN BROWN, GLENNIS BYRON, ALISON CHAPMAN, NATALIE M. HOUSTON, MICHELE MARTINEZ, PATRICIA PULHAM, MARJORIE STONE. ALISON CHAPMAN lectures in English literature at the University of Glasgow.

Lady Audley's Secret (1862) was one of the most widely read novels in the Victorian period. The novel exemplifies "sensation fiction" in featuring a beautiful criminal heroine, an amateur detective, blackmail, arson, violence, and plenty of suspenseful action. To its contemporary readers, it also offered the thrill of uncovering blackmail and criminal violence within the homes of the upper class. The novel makes trenchant critiques of Victorian gender roles and social stereotypes, and it creates significant sympathy for the heroine, despite her criminal acts, as she suffers from the injustices of the "marriage market" and rebels against them. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and a broad selection of primary source material, including reproductions of the twenty-two woodcut illustrations from the London Journal serialization of the novel, extracts from two Victorian dramatizations of the work, satirical commentaries, and contemporary reviews.