Victorian Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology

by Kate Flint (Editor)

This varied, unusual selection of short stories presents Victorian love in all its moods. Covering a period that embraces both Elizabeth Gaskell and Somerset Maugham, these stories range from the sentimental to the satiric, the crudely realistic to the perplexed, the mystical, and the
rapturous. The lovers include a shopkeeper and an aristocrat, an actress, a governess, Americans abroad, a seaweed gatherer, and a pair of herons.
Self-sacrifice and adultery figure prominently in these pages, as Victorian writers explored the nature of relationships at a time when women's growing independence brought traditional roles and assumptions into question. These stories confound expectations by recasting the familiar genres of
fable, fairy tale, and naturalism to deal with these new themes, as well as demonstrating the experimentation taking place with the short story form. Victorian Love Stories also contains an inclusive array of voices and perspectives; alongside the well-known work of Trollope and Hardy one finds
equally powerful stories by Lucy Clifford, Hubert Crackenthorpe, and Ellen T. Fowler.
Displaying the complexity of love and the inventiveness of Victorian fiction Victorian Love Stories is the perfect gift for any lover of Victoriana--or any lover.

Genres: Victorian, Short Stories, Classics, Adult Fiction

520 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 1996

About the author

Kate Flint is Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California. With an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute and a B.A. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, she previously taught at Rutgers, Oxford, and Bristol universities. Her areas of specialization include Victorian and early twentieth-century cultural, literary, and visual history. She’ author of Flash! Photography, Writing and Surprising Illumination (2017); The Transatlantic Indian 1776-1930 (2008); The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993). These last two books both won the British Academy’ Rose Mary Crawshay prize. She has previously held an ACLS Fellowship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Huntington Library. She’ currently President of the North American Victorian Studies Association.

Reviews

[Ceejay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Late November and into December is the perfect time of the year to read graphic novels, short stories, and short novels.There is so much to do to get ready for the holidays, and at times it's hard to get into a lengthy novel. This collection of 32 Vicrorian Love Stories is a great read.It features stories by Victorian "big guns" like Gaskell, Trollope, James, Wilde, and Maugham, and stories by writers with whom I wasn't familiar. While these stories center around love, some of them are quite surprising. There are tales of suicide, fantasy, the supernatural, and love gone wrong.A number were quite dark. So many novels in the Victorian Age questioned a woman's place in society, society in general, and class struggle. These short stories address the same issues.I'll be checking my local library and Amazon to find other works by the writers I was unfamilar with.There are no bad stories in this collection, and by the time you've read one or two of them, you'll be into that Victorian pattern of writing that shows why so much of it is considered classical! A GREAT read.

[Zen Cho · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this less than I thought I would, though it wasn't bad. Most of the stories were mediocre, I thought. The one that stands out most vividly in my memory is one about a nondescript wife whose husband marries her for her money: she's drab and shy and inwardly as well as outwardly colourless, but she loves him as well as she knows how. He has a mistress who is the love of his life because she actually has personality; wife finds out about mistress; wife undergoes considerable anguish; wife kills herself; husband all unknowing happily marries mistress; husband and new wife later find out that wife knew about them and suicided on their account, discovery accompanied by strong implication that breakdown of the marriage and spiral into joint despair is to follow. I cried buckets!

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this rather disappointing: there was nothing startling, nothing moving, nothing particularly well-written. Many of the stories read as if they were churned out for magazines of the day.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a bizarre mixed bag of stories from the totally depressing makes you want to throw yourself from a bridge if only there was one around to the gently sort of happy. I don’t regret reading them but I could only emotionally manage one or two a day.

[Wealhtheow · Rating 1 out of 5]

Studying these stories for an academic paper would probably be a lot of fun; not so much reading for pleasure. The usual tropes abound: the beautiful woman who dies of sorrow because she has an abusive husband, the captain who never loves again after finding comfort in the arms of a native lass, old lovers who are finally about to reunite after a lifetime apart--but die before they can meet...etc. All very melancholy, and very silly. These stories are practically parodies of Victorian sensibility. I shudder to think of their effects on unsuspected minds of the time.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some amazing authors included in this anthology--Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rosetti, Rudyard Kipling--but some other less well known ones, too. The stories will stick with you; some have a fairy tale feel, some are depressing, some happy, but every reader will find something unforgettable here. My personal fave is Ellen T. Fowler's "The Old Wives Tale." What an ending! Victorian lovers should pick this up.