Introduction

The Introduction outlines the ways in which the volume’s 16 original chapters identify innovations and continuities in women’s writing of the 1860s and the 1870s as female authors respond to a newly ‘Victorian’ tradition. Historically and culturally contextualizing female authorship within these two distinct decades, it discusses how women’s fiction challenged discourses of realism, sensation, and the new and of middle-class gender ideology and cultural norms. It reveals that women’s writing of the 1860s was concerned with disruption, change, and even crisis, while female-authored fiction of the 1870s paid attention to the material factors (including money and employment) that affected women’s lives. It also outlines the content of the volume’s chapters, which confirm that cultural shifts and possible responses to the unknown are addressed across a range of literary modes in female-authored 1860s and 1870s fiction.