Kirjahaku

Encouraged by the response of the avid novel-reading public in early nineteenth-century England, minor novelists produced a staggering number of volumes that shaped styles, formed attitudes, and gave to the novel a new status and respectability. These novels were read by both sexes, but the majority were written by women. Vineta Colby examines the works of such minor novelists as Mrs. Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Yonge, and Harriet Martincau, arguing that they prepared the way for the novels of the great Victorian era. Antiromantic and bourgeois in spirit, these domestic novels were concerned with daily living in ordinary society. As the form developed, the novels turned away from "idle romance" to a serious treatment of basic questions of human and social values. Professor Colby demonstrates how the preoccupation with high society, childhood, and village life laid the thematic foundations for the more sophisticated works of the later Victorians. The author concludes by showing that the disruption of the family unit by technology, urbanization, and scientific materialism led the domestic novel into the realms of literary naturalism and social realism. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Encouraged by the response of the avid novel-reading public in early nineteenth-century England, minor novelists produced a staggering number of volumes that shaped styles, formed attitudes, and gave to the novel a new status and respectability. These novels were read by both sexes, but the majority were written by women. Vineta Colby examines the works of such minor novelists as Mrs. Gore, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Yonge, and Harriet Martincau, arguing that they prepared the way for the novels of the great Victorian era. Antiromantic and bourgeois in spirit, these domestic novels were concerned with daily living in ordinary society. As the form developed, the novels turned away from "idle romance" to a serious treatment of basic questions of human and social values. Professor Colby demonstrates how the preoccupation with high society, childhood, and village life laid the thematic foundations for the more sophisticated works of the later Victorians. The author concludes by showing that the disruption of the family unit by technology, urbanization, and scientific materialism led the domestic novel into the realms of literary naturalism and social realism. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget in 1856 to English parents who lived on the continent, bridged two worlds and many cultures. She was a Victorian by birth but lived into the second quarter of the 20th century. Her chosen home was Itay, but she spent most part of every year in England where she published over the years an impressive number of books: novels, short stories, travel essays, studies of Italian art and music, psychological aesthetics and polemics. She was widely recognized as a woman of letters and moved freely in major literary and social circles, meeting and at time having close friendships with a huge number of the major writers and intellectuals of her time. Although she never committed herself to one programme of political activism, she was an advocate for feminism and social reform and during World War I was an ardent pacifist. In her last years she watched with dismay the emergence of fascism. This text recovers the crowded and intellectually eventful life from Vernon Lee's previously unpublished letters and journals, as well as from her books themselves. Vineta Colby also explores Lee's troubled personal life, from her childhood in an eccentric expatriate family to her several unhappy love affairs with women to her frank recognition that her work, brilliant as some of it was, remained unappreciated. Through it all, Vernon Lee clung to her faith in the life of the mind, and through Colby's engaging biographical narrative, she emerges today as a writer worthy of renewed attention and admiration.