Reassessing Women's Writing of the 1860s and 1870s

The ICVWW’s five-year project From Brontë to Bloomsbury: Realism, Sensation and the New in Women’s Writing from the 1840s to the 1930s aims to trace and reassess, decade by decade, how women’s writing develops in the cultural context of the 1840s to the 1930s: a transformative period in women’s private, public and literary lives.

Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th July 2015

Keynote address day one:

• ‘Punch and its Emerging “Sisterhood” of Contributors 1868 – 1880’ Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)

Keynote address day two:

• ‘[A] sad tale that she had to tell”: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) Professor Emeritus Adrienne Gavin

Full Conference Schedule

Following the project’s very successful first conference in 2014, devoted to women’s writing of the 1840s and 1850s, the second international conference explored the range and vitality of British women’s writing from 1860-1879.

The 1860s and 1870s saw the beginning of an organised ‘Women’s Movement’ and a heightened awareness of the subversive potential of female authorship. Fears for the moral health of the nation were exacerbated by the Girl of the Period and the explosion of ‘sensation’ novels in the wake of  Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne ; respectable women campaigned against The Contagious Diseases Acts, Queen Victoria was widowed and the Married Women’s Property Act was passed.

ICVWW Creative Writing Competition

To mark the centenary of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's death the ICVWW ran a creative writing competition. Find out who won on the Lady Audley's Secret blog.

Conference Storify

The second ICVWW annual conference took place 6-7 July 2015 at Canterbury Christ Church University. The small army of Tweeters present showed the fabulously diverse range of papers and captured some of the best bits...