English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D. (English), Brown University, 1978
B.A. (Literature), Wheaton College, summa cum laude, 1969

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: Victorian poetry and prose; life writing, especially autobiography; nature and travel writing; the history of authorship; 19th-century periodicals and print culture.
My research and teaching focus on 19th-century British literature.  I publish regularly on life writing and have written Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation and Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. My latest book, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Market, analyzes women’s authorship within the contexts of 19th-century publishing.  A new project includes articles (and eventually a book) on the debut volumes of British poets from Alfred Tennyson to Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy. I edit the Norton Reader, a collection of classic and contemporary essays, and teach English 120, an introductory course in the modern essay.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Victorian Market.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 

--The Autobiography of Harriet Martineau, with introduction, annotations, and historical appendices.  Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2007.

--The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, editor. In The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006

--Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, 2001

--“Tennyson and the Ladies.” Special issue on Tennyson at Two Hundred, ed. Herbert F. Tucker. Victorian Poetry, 47 (Spring 2009), 25-43.

--“Triangulation, Desire, and Discontent in The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 47 (Autumn 2007), 901-20.

--"Alice Meynell’s Preludes (1875): Preludes to What Future of Poetry?” Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006), 405-26

--"From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the ‘Little Book,’” Nineteenth Century Literature, 60 (2006), 409-50

--"The Feminist Origins of Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens.’” In Ruskin and Gender, ed. Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman. London: Palgrave Press, 2002. Pp. 86-106

--"Margaret Oliphant's Autobiography as Professional Artist's Life.” Women's Writing 6 (1999), 261-77

--"Sappho and the Making of Tennysonian Lyric,” ELH 61 (1994), 121-37

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: The Modern Essay, Major English Poets, Nature Writing in Britain and the Colonies, The English Bildungsroman, and Daily Themes

GRADUATE COURSES: Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Women Authors, and Late Victorian