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This is very much a contribution to the bigger picture on the nineteenth-century history of authorship, and a model for further scholarship in this area. Peterson's work allows us to see the importance of contextualizing whenever we consider an individual's work, for even literary geniuses who are born and bred in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors must work within the context of the market. The book embodies all that we expect of criticism these days. Peterson's readings are insightful, her range of reference astounding, but it is the methods of her scholarship that seem most pertinent in making this a book we should offer as a benchmark to our students.

Her generous yet deftly chosen illustrations amplify her arguments and deepen the literary and historical richness of this insightful study of Victorian women and authorship. Larsen Hoeckley, Christianity and Literature. Peterson makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the professionalisation of writing throughout the nineteenth century. Becoming a Woman of Letters is a major contribution to that history. The University of Alabama Press, Knowing Dickens. Cornell University Press, Paperback edition, Choice Outstanding Academic Book for Laura Green and William Cohen.

Robert L. Patten, John O. Jordan, and Catherine Waters. Oxford University Press, Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters. Ashgate, Lisa Rodensky. Oxford: Oxford UP, Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable.

Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes.

They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.