In 1900 Edith Cooper (one half of “Michael Field”) completed “Caenis Caeneus,” later published in the posthumous volume Dedicated (1914). The poem tells the story of the warrior Caeneus, who, according to various classical sources, is transformed from the maiden Caenis into the youth Caeneus by the sea god Poseidon. Cooper’s poem dwells on the joy and strength Caeneus discovers as he grows from boy to man, narrating his epic adventures until his death in battle and transformation into a bird, before becoming Caenis again in the underworld. Despite the suggestive gender transition at its heart and its focus on masculinity, the poem has been regarded primarily as a reflection on the restrictions of femininity. In this article, we consider the poem as a test site for considering trans masculinity at the fin de siècle, locating this within Michael Field’s engagement with the classical past, tracing trans ecologies through Caeneus’s response to the natural environment, and engaging with developing theories of trans poetics. Ultimately, we demonstrate the rich analytical frameworks that transgender studies offers to Michael Field studies and to Victorian literature more broadly.

In this article I look at the collaboration between Dickens and his greatest illustrator, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), in Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and especially Bleak House. In these works, text and image cluster around themes of fallen sexuality, feminine transgression, and the problematic identity of woman as both protagonist and narrator or author. I argue that Browne’s illustrations offer not a counternarrative to Dickens’s but a submerged one, especially in relation to controversial or taboo material. The text and plates work in unison to make manifest what might be present but only subtly telegraphed by Dickens’s words. My piece culminates in speculation about Dickens’s creation of the first-person narrator, Esther Summerson, in Bleak House: was Dickens responding to the proliferation of women-authored texts and women narrators? And were Dickens and Browne signaling in repeated depictions of a faceless Esther that the sex and identity of authorship were mysterious and unsettlingly mutable?

The word “thug” entered the common English language in a slew of texts published in London across the 1830s. These works—narrative accounts as well as social histories—cataloged the so-called cult of Indian thugs, a newly “discovered” band of highway robbers believed to operate throughout the Indian subcontinent. This essay traces a literary and cultural history of these representations; yet, I argue, many of their roots are to be found less in Indian social history than in the existing discursive structures of London. In particular, medico-literary frameworks of sensibility—in existing use to construct and mediate metropolitan sensationalism—came, consequentially, to inform both these imperial representations and the associated conceptualizations of national boundaries.

This article examines the significance of Christina Rossetti’s caregiving responsibilities and suggests that the relationship between caring and writing is a central, if critically neglected, concern of her poetics. I focus on two periods in Rossetti’s life to show how her creative practice was shaped by her duties as a carer, and vice versa. In the 1840s, when the adolescent Rossetti suffers a breakdown while caring for her father, Gabriele, her physician, Dr. Charles Hare, helps her find solace in self-reflection and writing poetry. Forty years later, Rossetti revisits Hare’s holistic approach when looking after her mother and aunts. During this period, she produces Time Flies, the experimental, hybrid form of which addresses and accommodates her struggles to balance writing and caring. I conclude by arguing that Rossetti’s efforts to live and write with divided attention provide fresh opportunities for exploring the connections between domestic labor and creativity. As well as endorsing Talia Schaffer’s call for “a literary criticism that is predicated on care,” I propose that writing as an act of care has implications beyond the academy: I end with a short discussion of the ongoing poetry workshops for carers that were directly inspired by my research on Christina Rossetti.

This cluster of short essays discusses Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology, the Novel and Sexual Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the North American Victorian Studies Association’s 2023 Subsequent Book Prize, along with a response from the author.

This short essay considers Kathy Psomiades’s recent book, Primitive Marriage: Victorian Anthropology and the Novel, from a feminist perspective.

Primitive Marriage analyzes the conjectural history installed in Victorian anthropology and taken up by novelists, in which sex drives a civilizational progress from domination and force to liberal relations of exchange, contract, and consent. Kathy Psomiades’s act of critical reflection doubles fin-de-siècle anthropology’s reflexive turn upon its own investments in symbol and representation. Her argument models an ethically and politically responsible criticism that restores the difference of past cultural formations, viewed as unfinished, potential, and manifold in their bearing on our present.

This essay considers the contributions that Primitive Marriage makes to psychoanalytic theory and the history of sexuality. It also explores the ways that Kathy Psomiades’s emphasis on the Victorian anthropology of marriage complicates our understanding of the histories of structuralism and critical theory in the present.

Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage argues that Victorian thinkers used consent as the turning point of history, changing our reading of the marriage plot.

This essay describes the elaborative model of knowledge production that is both the topic of Kathy Psomiades’s Primitive Marriage and its method. The annotative procedure of (as Psomiades puts it) “adding” to what has come before is dialectical insofar as it understands any concept to emerge from the historical conditions enabling it; it is collaborative insofar as it links thinking agents across bounds of difference; and it is political in that it offers to locate the preconditions for thought in time but then find supplements, blank spots—openings for change. The essay closes with a biographical example of this model in action, in a scene of feminist mentorship from the early 2000s.