Protest and reform

Scholars have long credited the Victorian social novel to a mostly male group of authors. Joseph Kestner argues the record is incomplete: a line of women writers, many now relegated to a brief note in literary histories, started the tradition. Through narrative fiction, they protested injustice, exposed social wrongs, and pushed for change.

Kestner examines how these novels shaped Victorian social policy. He looks at lesser-known women, including Hannah More, Elizabeth Stone, Frances Trollope, Charlotte Tonna, Camilla Toulmin, Geraldine Jewsbury, Fanny Mayne, Julia Kavanagh and Dinah Mulock Craik. He also considers better-known novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, alongside male writers Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, G. M. W. Reynolds, John Galt and Charles Kingsley.