The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain.
 
These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives.
 
By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them.

The novels in this collection include:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Duke’s Children  by Anthony Trollope
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray
Middlemarch  by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Annette R. Federico is a professor of English at James Madison University. She is the author of four books, most recently Thus I Lived with Words: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Writer’s Craft, and editor of Gilbert and Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic” after Thirty Years (University of Missouri Press). She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia.