Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Giving special attention to critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Joanne Wilkes offers in-depth examinations of reviews by eight female critics: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Augusta Ward. What they wrote about women writers, and what their writings tell us about the critics' sense of themselves, reveals the distinctive character of nineteenth-century women's contributions to literary history.