Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by William Quiller Orchardson, William Powell Frith and John Everett Millais. A publisher's tribute to the women who wrote fiction in Victoria's reign, each essay written by a novelist of the day: Margaret Oliphant on the Brontës, Eliza Lynn Linton on George Eliot, Edna Lyall on Mrs Gaskell, and on through Mrs Henry Wood, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Dinah Craik, Julia Kavanagh, Amelia Edwards, Caroline Norton and Juliana Ewing. Only writers who had died were admitted, so every subject is a finished career, judged by colleagues rather than critics. Oliphant, who had produced nearly a hundred books herself, opens the volume. Sixty plates of reading women and quiet studies, by painters from Frith to Mancini, echo the bookish lives gathered here.