Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics

This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). This volume aims to restore an author who was "[o]nce as famous as Dickens or Thackeray" (Wilson 1986, v) to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature.

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This is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790-1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing was prescient. Best known today for her collection of "real" ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: Or Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works covered the Newgate genre, helped to initiate detective fiction, included elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and pointed the way to the Sensation novels of the 1860s. Politically radical in many ways Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights. This volume aims to restore an author who was once famous and lauded to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian Literature.