Jennifer Phegley is a Professor of English as well as Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Graduate Programs. She is the author of Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation (The Ohio State University Press 2004) and Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Bloomsbury 2012). She also co-edited Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (with Janet Badia, University of Toronto Press 2005), Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (with Andrew Maunder, Palgrave 2010) and Transatlantic Sensations (with John Barton and Kristin Houston, Routledge 2016).
Phegley’s latest book on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the penny press, and the sensation novel is forthcoming from Manchester University Press in its Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series. This book will provide the first in-depth study of Braddon’s early career as an anonymous penny press writer for working-class readers, which Phegley argues was essential to the author’s well-charted success as a best-selling sensation novelist for middle-class readers. Phegley contends that Braddon’s cheap weekly magazine serials not only laid the foundation for the juggernaut of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and its follow-up Aurora Floyd (1863), but also that her penny press characters, plots, themes, and sometimes even entire works were revamped and repackaged as expensive three-volume novels for a higher class of circulating library reader. These “rogue” practices—carried out in collaboration with her publisher and domestic partner John Maxwell—were surprisingly successful even though they traversed the sacrosanct class boundaries of respectable Victorian publishing.
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