Recovering Lost Voices: Nineteenth-Century British Literature

'Recovering Lost Voices' explores what recovery work looks like in the twenty-first century and why its continued practice is necessary. This collection is concerned with the volume of lost British texts and authors of the nineteenth century and offers a practical and personal approach to the act of recovery and the continued practice of re-recovery. Spanning the course of the nineteenth century, the included recovered works provide glimpses into the forgotten lives of poets, playwrights, and authors, enriching the working understanding we hold of this period. Our contributors explain their unique and original personal methods and experiences of discovering their lost work and detail the process of re-recovery. This volume ultimately functions as guidance for university students and early career scholars interested in uncovering what recovery and re-recovery work entails through personal accounts. The included contributions approach recovery in archives, street markets, digital access, and manual transcribing. Re-recovery takes the form of applied lenses of analysis, such as queer, post-colonial, gender, disability, and trauma studies.

Preface
Lanya Lamouria
Missouri State University
Introduction: Why Recover Now?
Michaela George and Elizabeth Drummey
Chapter One
Alice Flowerdew and Didactic Melancholy
Samantha Trzinski
The Ohio State University
Chapter Two
Approaching Nautical Fiction by Female Seafarers
Ruth Gehrmann
Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
Chapter Three
‘[A]ll but forgotten’: Thomas Anstey Guthrie
Hayley Smith
Independent Scholar
Chapter Four
Insanity in the Works of W.G. Wills
Maria Serena Marchesi
University of Messina, Italy
Chapter Five
Strength, Comfort, Delight: Elizabeth Murray’s Sixteen Years
Charles Reeve
OCAD University
Chapter Six
Detection and Gender in L.T. Meade’s Mysteries
Marie Kluge
Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg
Sophie-Constanze Bantle
University of Freiburg
Chapter Seven
Julia Wedgwood and the Gender-Norm Covenant
Madison Marshall
University of Leeds
Chapter Eight
Baker’s Ceylon and the Oriental Gaze
Sharmila Jayasinghe
University of Sydney
Chapter Nine
G. P. R. James and the Decline of Historical Romance
Tom Bragg
Lincoln Memorial University
Chapter Ten
Recovering Egypt in Marie Corelli’s Ziska
Drew Banghart
West Liberty University
Chapter Eleven
Witnessing Trauma in A Sunless Heart
Lesley Goodman
Albright College
About the Contributors
Index

Michaela George received her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of New Hampshire in 2025. She currently holds a faculty position at Georgia College & State University. Her research interests include illness, feminism, and mother-daughter relationships. She has engaged with the concepts of the labor of care in her examinations of mother-daughter inheritances. Her dissertation, titled 'A Daughter’s Inheritance: The Construction of Motherhood through Death', is concerned with how the construction of motherhood occurs in deathbed scenes in Romantic literature. She received her MA from Northern Arizona University in 2018. Her essay “The Symbolism of Trees in Tess of the d’Urbervilles” is published in 'The Explicator'.
Elizabeth Drummey is an independent scholar who received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Hampshire in 2025. Her research interests include overlooked Victorian women writers, the nineteenth-century literary marketplace, and the Gothic novel. Her dissertation, '“She wrote too much”: Overproduction, Canonicity, and Victorian Women Novelists', explores how accusations of “writing too much” have kept prolific and popular novelists like Margaret Oliphant, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charlotte Riddell out of the literary canon. Her article “‘A novel in two years was thought the proper course’: Overproduction and the Quality of Literature in Charlotte Riddell’s 'A Struggle for Fame'” is forthcoming in 'Victoriographies'.

Recovery, Re-Recovery, Nineteenth-century, Literature, British