This collection of essays helpfully extends our understanding of Victorian life-writing as a genre whose protean shape was determined by the changing print culture of this period as much as by developments in psychology and sexology. The examples, ranging from diaries crafted with an eye to posterity, to press obituaries subject to highly topical exigencies, provide a conspectus of the period and offer a sense of varied cultural contexts including class, political and religious affiliations, public and private spheres, the domestic and colonial. True to the volume’s aim of unsettling assumed hierarchies of genre and gender the essays by and large eschew re-examining the canonical monuments of the genre in favour of lesser known or ‘marginal’ works and prosopographies. While better known figures of ‘high culture’, such as Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Gandhi appear, they jostle shoulders with Samuel Bamford, Philip Meadows Taylor, Theophilia Carlile Campbell and George Ives, taking their place alongside collective studies of literary men and women, of middle-class males, and a consideration of the autobiographical output of the Benson family. Life writing is revealed as a forum where notions of identity were both inscribed and interrogated, producing for modern criticism a rich and fertile field of examples, whose virtue is their very chronological specificity, for testing the received nostrums of feminist, gender and Freudian theories.

The volume originated in a panel at the 2001 international conference ‘Locating the Victorians’ (London, 2001) which had as its overarching agenda the evaluation of the state of research into the nineteenth-century as we entered the twenty-first. The concern these individual contributions show for locating their findings within a wider historical and critical framework is what will make this volume useful beyond the sum of its parts to those working in the broadly-conceived area of life-writing. Its lengthy gestation has also permitted the sense of dialogue between the contributions so often missing from conference collections.

The contributions, as befits the stellar cast-list, are both informative and well-written. The only element that might have improved the volume would have been the inclusion, probably precluded by the series format, of a final cumulative Bibliography of recent Victorian life-writing criticism.

Elisabeth Jay (Oxford Brookes University)

For more details, see the Ashgate Press website