Tag: Margaret Oliphant

 “Going Off” in Fat Victorian Novels

Other

I recently picked up a long Victorian novel that has long been on my list, Margaret Oliphant’s 1866 Miss Marjoribanks. It features a protagonist who recalls Jane Austen’s Emma, the spoiled, clever, and maddening Lucilla Marjoribanks (pronounced “Marchbanks”), who is determined to have her way in everything as she navigates through a marriage plot in a sleepy provincial mid-Victorian English town. Miss Marjoribanks is a good pandemic read for the comfortable satisfactions it offers as a sprawling realist novel that

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Patricia Zakreski, Making a Black Ball Gown: Fashion and Social Change in the 1870s

Published in JVC, Victorians on Display

Patricia Zakreski is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (Ashgate, Farnham, 2006). She is co-editor of ‘What is a Woman to Do?’ A Reader on Women, Work and Art, c. 1830–1890 (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2011) and Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain (Ashgate, Farnham, 2013). Her current project includes articles and

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