Michael Lund

Linda K. Hughes

Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund provide a new approach to the study of installment literature by showing how it embodied a view of life intrinsic to Victorian culture. They examine how the serial format affected the ways Victorian audiences interpreted sixteen major works of poetry and fiction. Their findings show that Victorian interpretations were different from those of twentieth century single-volume readings. Hughes and Lund conclude that in order to understand Victorian literature, we must understand serialization, since it was the vehicle for the best literature of the age. Further, they assert we must understand serialization as a literary form attuned to the fundamental spirit of the age.

The Victorian Serial

Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siecle London and the way literary reputations are made---and lost. A participant in aestheticism and decadence, she wrote six volumes of poems noted for their subtle cadence, diction, and uncanny effects. Linda K. Hughes unfolds a complex life in Graham R: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, tracing the poet's development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary Modernism. Despite an early first divorce she won fame writing under a pseudonym, Graham R. Tomson. The influential Andrew Lang announced the arrival of a new poet he thought a man. She was soon hosting socials attended by Lang, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells and other 1890s notables. Publishing to widespread praise, as Graham R. she exemplified the complex cultural politics of her era. Her consummate grace, beauty, and wit captivated Thomas Hardy and left an impression on his work. At the height of her success she fell in love with writer H. B. Marriott Watson. She dared a second divorce and became Rosamund Marriott Watson. Graham R.: Rosamund Marriot Watsont, Woman of Letters combines the stories of a gifted poet, of London literary networks in the 1890s, and of a bold woman whose achievements and scandals turned on her unusual history of marriage and divorce. Her literary history and her uncommon experience together reveal the limits and opportunities faced by an unconventional, ambitious, and talented woman at the turn of the century. Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, is the author of The Manyfaced Glass: Tennyson's Dramatic Monologues (Ohio, 1987), New Woman Poets: An Anthology, and, with Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial and Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work.

Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters

Graham R.

Inclusive, cutting-edge essay collection by leading scholars on Victorian women poets and their diverse poetic forms and identities.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

For much of her own century, Elizabeth Gaskell was recognized as a voice of Victorian convention—-the loyal wife, good mother, and respected writer—-a reputation that led to her steady decline in the view of twentieth-century literary critics. Recent scholars, however, have begun to recognize that Mrs. Gaskell's high standing in Victorian society allowed her to effect change in conventional ideology. Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund focus this reevaluation on issues pertaining to the Victorian literary marketplace. Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfill and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace. While she wrote for money, producing periodical fiction, major novels, and nonfiction, Mrs. Gaskell was able to maintain a tone of warmth and empathy that allowed her to imagine multiple social and epistemological alternatives. Writing from within the established rubrics of gender, narrative, and publication format, she nevertheless performed important cultural work.

Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work

An overview of British poetry from 1830 to 1901, with a glossary of literary terms and guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry

E. M. Forster

Mary Lago

Elizabeth MacLeod Walls

"Seventy of Forster's BBC broadcasts trace his evolution from novelist to skillful cultural critic, revealing his vitality and importance as an astute critic of contemporary literature--from Joyce to Steinbeck to Tagore--and a political activist for India

Linda K. Hughes

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