Newsletters
View the current issue: BAVS Newsletter (25.2) Summer 2025
View Newsletter Archive (2009-24)
The Association’s tri-annual newsletter provides a combination of review articles, topical features, and announcements of recent publications relating to the world of Victorian studies.
The Newsletter Editor is Amy Waterson and the Assistant Editor is Ruth-Anne Walbank. They warmly welcome submissions for future issues (see guidelines below). Please contact them with any items for inclusion at BAVSnews@gmail.com.
Calls for papers and details of forthcoming events related to Victorian studies are shared on The Victorianist and are sent out regularly to all members via the BAVS Circular.
Page Contents:
Book Reviews
Recently Published Work
Newsletter Submission Guidelines
Reviews
Announcements
Feedback Survey
We invite BAVS members to share their feedback on the newsletter. This quick 3-minute survey is your chance to tell us what you love about the newsletter and what else you’d like to see! Please share your constructive feedback and ideas so that the new Communication Team can continue shaping the newsletter in a way that speaks to every member of BAVS.
Reviews
The BAVS Newsletter is always looking for new reviewers, particularly among postgraduate, early-career and independent researchers. To express an interest in reviewing, please include your name, affiliation (if applicable), current status and five research keywords in an email to the Editor, Amy Waterson (BAVSnews@gmail.com). If you are particularly interested in reviewing one of the books listed below or have another book in mind, please also include its title. Reviewers will be required to join BAVS if they have not done so already.
The Newsletter reviews two types of writing: (a) recently published work on any aspect of Victorian history, literature and culture and (b) foundational contributions to Victorian studies, published between 1950 and the present. We are also keen to publish reviews of recent exhibitions, theatre productions, and other cultural events of Victorianist interest.
Recently Published Work
This is a list of books that we’re interested in reviewing for the BAVS Newsletter:
- Christine Skelton, Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship (Manchester University Press, 2023)
- Sarah Parker, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024)
- Debra Gettelman, Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels (Princeton University Press, 2024)
- Anne Jacob Priyanka, The Victorian Novel On File: Secrets, Hoards, and Information Storage (Oxford University Press, 2024)
- Lindsey N. Chappell, Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean Writing British Heritage in Ancient Lands (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
- Melissa Dickson, Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science Listening at the Threshold (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
- James Machin (Editor), The Stark Munro Letters: Arthur Conan Doyle (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
- Sarah Sharp, Kirkyard Romanticism: Death, Modernity, and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
- Ole Münch, Rag Fair: A Different Migration History of London’s East End 1780 – 1850, (Berghan, 2024)
- Julia Ditter, Scottish Literature, Borders and the Environmental Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2025)
- James Thomas Quinnell, The Brontës as Gothic Writers: “The Afflicted Imagination”, (University of Wales Press, 2025)
- Elizabeth Ludlow, Prayer and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2025)
- Jeremy Parrott, David Copperfield Unbound: A Genetic Study (Routledge, 2025)
- Dan Sperrin, State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025)
- Anna-Julia Zweirlein, Lecturing Women in British Fiction: Periodicals and Public Orality, 1870 – 1910. The First Speech (Routledge, 2025)
- Richard Aspin, The Lure of the South: Health, the Victorians, and the Continent. (Bloomsbury, 2025)
- Koenraad Claes and Elizabeth Ludlow, The nineteenth-century present: Literature, Print Culture, and Historicity, (Manchester University Press, 2025)
- Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery, Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 2025)
- Juliette Atkinson and Elisha Cohn, The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot, (Oxford University Press, 2025)
- Teja Varma Pusipati, Model Women of the Press: Gender, Politics, and Women’s Professional Journalism 1850 – 1880, (Routledge, 2027)
- Sabrina Gilchrist Hadyk, The Waltzing Body in Victorian Literature: Narratives of Sexuality and Power, (Oxford University Press, 2025)
- Marion Sherwood and Rosalind Boyce, Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women, (Bloomsbury, 2025)
- Piya Pal-Lapinski, Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire in Romantic and Victorian Culture: The Sultan’s City, 1800 – 1876, (Bloomsbury, 2025)
- Juliette Atkinson, A Very Short Introduction to George Eliot, (Oxford University Press, 2025)
If you are interested in reviewing a recent book that is not listed here, you are welcome to contact us via email to suggest a title and we will endeavour to request a review copy from the publisher. Authors, editors and publishers of recent work on any aspect of Victorian history, literature and culture are also invited to get in touch to suggest titles for review. Reviews printed in the BAVS Newsletter are distributed to over 1000 members around the world and then archived here, on our open-access website. Reviews will be returned to each book’s publisher to aid their publicity efforts.
Please email the newsletter team at bavsnews@gmail.com to express your interest in reviewing a recently published title.
Recent Exhibitions/Events
We are keen to feature reviews of new exhibitions, theatre productions, or other cultural events that relate to Victorian studies. Some suggestions of recent events include:
- Showtime! Charles Dickens Museum (2025)
- Country Lives: Exploring the English Countryside from 1800 Weston Gallery, University of Nottingham (2025)
- From Haworth to Eternity: The Enduring Legacy of the Brontës Brontë Parsonage Museum (2025)
- Sights of Wonder: Photographs from the 1862 Royal Tour The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham (2026)
If you would like to share your experiences at one of the events listed, or a similar recent event, please contact us via email to discuss writing a review.
Foundational Texts series
We ask that reviewers revisit a foundational contribution to Victorian studies, published between 1950 and the present. How has it been built on, nuanced, and challenged by subsequent scholarship? Is it still a ‘game-changer’?
Suggestions:
- Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983; CUP, 2000, 2009)
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
- Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Please note that in most instances it will not be possible for us to provide a copy of these books. Any and all ideas very welcome, do get in contact at bavsnews@gmail.com.
Newsletter Submission Guidelines
Reviews
All contributors to the BAVS Newsletter are provided with our Guidance Document (PDF).
A full summary of our guidelines will be sent with the title for review, but the key points are as follows:
- Single reviews should be 750-850 words, while reviews of two or more titles are limited to 1250 words.
- Reviews should offer a description of the book or resource, as well as analysis of its achievements and its place within current scholarship.
- Parentheses rather than footnotes, endnotes, or bibliographies should be used for references.
- The BAVS Newsletter otherwise follows MHRA guidelines for spelling, grammar, and bibliographical references.
- The review heading should appear as follows: Book Title, by Author (Place of Publication: Publisher, Year), XXpp., £XX
(paper/hardback), ISBN XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X
All book review submissions go through an editorial review process, which may entail requests for revision prior to publication. Please note that the editors work with the BAVS Executive Committee to ensure that quality standards are maintained, and in some instances this may necessitate a blind peer review process.
Our Guidance document which provides the bare bones of what we expect from a review in terms of form and content. But what distinguishes an interesting, engaging, and useful review from one that is simply a chapter overview? Opinions differ, but we can recommend the following short pieces on the art of reviewing to prompt reflection on this often-tricky form of academic writing:
- Rohan McWilliam, ‘On Reviewing’ (2016)
- James Gifford ‘The Year’s Work of Reading the Reviewer’ (2016)
- Dennis Wise, ‘The Ethics of Academic Book Reviewing’ (2022)
With thanks to all those on Twitter who helped to source these recommendations. Further reading suggestions can be found in this thread.
Announcements
The BAVS newsletter appears three times a year and so it usually more suitable to send time-sensitive announcements such as calls for papers and details of forthcoming events to The Victorianist, through which they will be sent to members via the BAVS Circular. However, if you wish to submit an announcement to the newsletter, please follow the following guidelines:
- All announcements should be attached either as a MS Word document (not PDF please) or included in the text of the email
- All images attached as JPEGs (including book covers)
- Please include all details you wish to be published in the newsletter in the submitted text
- Please make sure any links included are live (including Twitter handles)
- Single quotation marks should be used