Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics
Among the Victorians and Modernists Series

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.

Part One: From Newgate to Sensation

Chapter One: The Newgate Novel, Crime, and Detection in Catherine Crowe’s Early Fiction

Chapter Two: Forays into Sensation

Part Two: Realism and Politics

Chapter Three: Class, Poverty, and Realism

Chapter Four: Radical Social Politics

Part Three: Gender

Chapter Five: Women’s Position and Women’s Rights

Chapter Six: Crowe’s Men

Part Four: Supernature and the Gothic

Chapter Seven: Ghosts of the Old and New School

Chapter Eight: The Gothic Short Stories

Ruth Heholt is senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University, UK.