Lisa Surridge

• University of Victoria

Focusing on East Lynne (1860–61) and Lord Oakburn's Daughters (1864) and referring to Victorian advice manuals for pregnant women, this article argues that Ellen Wood centered pregnancy and childbirth as critical experiences of women's lives. In East Lynne , Isabel gives birth to her first child in a difficult labor that nearly kills her; her futur...

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in tabular as well as circular formats and were printed in books, periodicals and pocketbooks designed for both medical practitioners and fertile...

It is a truism that Victorians were prudish about pregnant bodies. Interrogating this assumption, this paper provides a case study of one of the century’s most public pregnancies: that of Queen Victoria with her first child. It tracks press speculations about and discussions of Victoria’s pregnancy from weeks after her 10 February 1840 marriage to...

When Elizabeth Gaskell died in November 1865, she left unfinished her final novel, Wives and Daughters (1864-66). The Cornhill Magazine's editor, Frederick Greenwood, published a tribute to Gaskell with the novel's final installment. Her fiction, he wrote, pulls you from an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base pa...

In 1859 the popular novelist Wilkie Collins wrote of a ghostly woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments, laying her cold, thin hand on the shoulder of a young man as he walked home late one evening. His novel The Woman in White became hugely successful and popularised a style of writing that came to be known as sensation fiction. This Comp...

This article examines Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), a novel that has attracted varied ideological critique yet whose different transatlantic forms remain understudied. In an international market ungoverned by copyright law, Collins sold his story on both sides of the Atlantic, but the serial of The Moonstone that reached American readers d...

In Radiant Textuality, Jerome McGann reminds us that the material form of a text always signifies; however, critics have yet to consider the crucial narratological role of illustration in the Victorian serial novel. This study of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's sensational Eleanor's Victory and Elizabeth Gaskell's realist Wives and Daughters argues that i...

"Professor Surridge exhibits a clear and persuasive historical sense as well as sensitivity to the novels and stories. I believe this study will have lasting value because of its careful historical research and corresponding interpretation of the texts," says Naomi Wood, Kansas State University The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 was a piec...

IN CONSIDERING THE SUBJECT of masculinity in Mary Barton (1848), it is perhaps well to remember that Elizabeth Gaskell conceived the novel as being about a man. “‘John Barton’ was the original title of the book,” she wrote to Mrs. W. R. Greg early in 1849. “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero, the per...

Animals — especially dogs — pervade Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff's pointer attacks Lockwood; the Lintons' dog mauls Catherine Earnshaw when she and Heathcliff spy on the Linton children; and Isabella watches Hareton hang a litter of puppies on a chair back. Yet Emily Brontë's novel does not participate in the sentimentality and anthropomorphism wh...

Lisa Surridge, Department of English, University of Victoria