A compendious illustrated guide to those industrious but often overlooked women writers of the Victorian era: the famous, the forgotten and the forlorn. More than 1,500 women authors, along with over 400 pseudonyms, 400 quotes and extracts, and a further 40 subject entries and essays.
Not just the familiar names - though they're all there - but literally hundreds of minor and middle-ranking authors, along with the magazines they were serialized in, the trends, the publishers, and the disadvantages and problems women writers faced in what was assumed to be a man's world.
You'll find entries on The Bigamy Novel, Children's Literature, Domestic Fiction, Feminism First Faltering Footsteps, Ghost Stories, Governess Stories, Literary Style, Living in a Man's World, Morality and Religion, The New Woman, Romance, Sensation Novels, Silly and Silver Fork Novels, Social Conditions and Reform, The Three-Decker novel, Tracts and Tract Societies, Travellers and Explorers, 'Womanly Fiction', 'Woman's Place' - and more.

This is a popular encyclopaedia, not an academic text. It's a book to read and enjoy, to dip into and consult for reference, and it's very readable. Not only is it written in easy-to-read prose but (almost uniquely) it is packed with extracts from Victorian women's writing - paragraphs, short scenes, verses - to bring these authors back to life.