Academic Profile

Specializes in Victorian and Modern Novel, Victorian Studies, and autobiographical narrative.

Publications

Books

• Knowing Dickens. Cornell University Press, 2007. 
• The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1994. Paperback edition, 1996.  Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1995. 
• The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Cornell University Press, 1988.
  Paperback edition, 1991.

 Articles

• “City Walkers: London in the Victorian Novel,” forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to London in English Literature, ed. Lawrence Manley.
• “The Nice Work of Victorian Novels in Thatcher’s England.” In Victorian Turns and Neo-Victorian Returns, ed. Penny Gay, Judith Johnston and Catherine Waters. Cambridge Scholars Press (2008), pp.  171-181.
• “Dickens, Fascinated.” Victorian Studies 48.2 (2006): 268-276.
• "Dickens and the Writing of a Life." In Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. John Bowen and Robert Patten (2005) 48-68.
• “Autobiography in Fragments: The Elusive Life of Edith Simcox.” Victorian Studies 44.3 (Spring 2002): 399-422.
• “Dickens and the Identical Man: Our Mutual Friend Doubled.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 31 (2002): 159-174.
• “A Woman of Many Names.” In A Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 20-37. 
• "Knowing and Telling in Dickens's Retrospects." In Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001), 215-233.
• "Mary Ann Evans's Holy War: An Essay in Letter-Reading." Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (December 1989): 335-363.
• "Ambition and its Audiences: George Eliot's Performing Figures." Victorian Studies  34 (Autumn 1990): 7-33.
• "George Eliot and the Power of Evil-Speaking." Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 201-226.
• "The Interregnum of Ownership in July's People." The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer, ed. Bruce King (London: Macmillan, 1992), 108-120.
• "Jane Eyre in Search of Her Story." Papers on Language and Literature 16 (1980): 387-402. Reprinted in The Brontë's: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 155-168.
• "Looking at the Landscape in Jane Austen." Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 605-623.
• "Private Griefs and Public Acts in Mary Barton." Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 195-216. Reprinted in Mary Barton, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Thomas Recchio, 2008. 
• "The Romantic Impasse in A Passage to India." Criticism 22 (1980): 40-56.
• "St. Mawr, A Passage to India, and the Question of Influence." D.H.Lawrence Review 13 (1980); 134-149.
• "North and South: A Permanent State of Change." Nineteenth-Century Fiction (December 1979): 281-301. Reprinted in North and South, Norton Critical Edition, 2004.
• "Dickens and the Art of Pastoral." Centennial Review 23 (1979): 452-467. 

Reviews

• Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection, forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly.
• “George Gissing,” review essay in London Review of Books, summer 2009
• “Secret-Keeping,” review essay on the Pickering edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, London Review of Books 29.16 (16 August 2007).
• Barbara Hardy, George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography. The George Eliot Review 38 (2007): 49-50.
• Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.1 (2006): 103-107.
• Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. Modern Language Quarterly 66.3 (2005): 404-406.
• “How We Do Victorian Novels,” review of The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David.  Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, December 2001.
• “The Biographer as Therapist: George Eliot and Kathryn Hughes.” REVIEW 23 (2001): 237-244.
• The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, Victorian Studies 42 (Autumn 2000): 135-137.
• Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson. Victorian Studies 42 (Spring 2000): 548-550.
• "Autobiography without Borders," review essay, Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 317-325.
• Elizabeth Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840-1895. Modern Language Quarterly  59 (1998): 391-393.
• The Letters of George Henry Lewes, ed. William Baker. Victorian Studies 39 (1996):566-569.
• Dorothy Mermin, Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England 1830-1880.  Modern Philology  93 (1996): 393-396.
• John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Victorian Studies 39 (1995): 67-69. 
• Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters.  Prose Studies 18 (1995): 110-112.
• Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel. Victorian Studies 34, Autumn 1990