Victorian Literature Reading List

The following reading list for the English and Film Studies PhD program is provided by the department and is updated yearly to reflect changes in the discipline.

For more information about reading lists, see the Comprehensive Area Exam page.

Updated: September 2025

Fiction

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Poetry

• Matthew Arnold: “Empedocles on Etna” “The Buried Life” “Dover Beach”
• Emily Brontë: “Remembrance” “Stanzas” “No coward soul is mine”
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “To George Sand: A Desire” “To Georges Sand: A Recognition” “The Cry of the Children” “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
• Robert Browning: “Andrea del Sarto” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” “Caliban upon Setebos” “Fra Lippo Lippi” 2 “My Last Duchess” “Porphyria's Lover”
• Michael Field: “A Girl” “It was deep April, and the more” “La Gioconda” “The Magdalen” “To Christina Rossetti”
• Felicia Hemans: “The Homes of England” “Woman and Fame”
• Thomas Hardy: “Hap” “Nature’s Questioning” “Neutral Tones” “The Darkling Thrush”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” “Felix Randal” “God’s Grandeur” “No Worst, There is None” “Pied Beauty” “Spring and Fall”
• Rudyard Kipling: “Gunga Din” “The White Man’s Burden” “Recessional”
• Christina Rossetti: “After Death” “A Birthday” “Goblin Market” “In An Artist’s Studio” “Remember” “Sleeping at Last”
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “The Blessed Damozel” “Body’s Beauty” “Jenny” “My Sister’s Sleep” “Soul’s Beauty”
• Algernon Charles Swinburne: “Hymn to Prosperpine” “The Leper”
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson: In Memoriam A.H.H. “The Lady of Shalott” “Mariana” “Morte d’Arthur” “Ulysses”
• Oscar Wilde: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Drama

• Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn
• Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
• George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession
• Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Non-Fiction and Philosophy

• Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy
• Mona Caird, “Marriage”
• Thomas Carlyle, Sator Resartus
• Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”
• Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period”
• Thomas Babington Macaulay, “‘Minute’on Indian Education”
• Henry Mayhew, selections from London Labour and the London Poor
• John Stuart Mill
  On Liberty, “Introduction”
  On The Subjection of Women
• John Ruskin
  “The Nature of the Gothic” (Stones of Venice)
  “Of Queens’” Gardens (Sesame and Lilies)
  “Of Pathetic Fallacy” (Modern Painters)
• Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”

Critical Material

Period Overviews

• Adams, James Eli. A History of Victorian Literature. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Behlman, Lee and Anne Longmuir (eds.). Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830-1890. London: Longman, 1993.
• Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Politics and Post-Colonial

• Archibald, Diana C. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.
• Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
• Goodlad, Lauren M. E. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. 4
• McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge: 1995.
• Plotz, John. The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Said, Edward W. Introduction. Orientalism. (1978). New York: Vintage, 1994.

Style and Genre

• Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Politics, Poetics. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987
• Booth, Michael R. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
• Chothia, Jean. English Drama of the Early Modern Period, 1890-1940. Harlow: Longman, 1996.
• Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
• Slinn, E. Warwick. Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: The Politics of Performative Language. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.
• Smith, Andrew. Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.

Science and Industry

• Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983.
• Chapple, J.A.V. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986.
• Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
• Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Gender

• Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
• Foucault, Michel. “We ‘Other’ Victorians.” History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 3-13.
• Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
• Newman, Beth. Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity. Athens: U of Ohio P, 2004.
• Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
• Shires, Linda M., Ed. Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.