Linda Peterson

Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English

Address: LC 301
Phone: 203-432-0528
Email: linda.peterson@yale.edu
CV | Office hours
On leave Spring 2013

Ph.D. (English), Brown University, 1978
B.A. (Literature), Wheaton College, summa cum laude, 1969

My research and teaching focus on 19th-century British literature.  I publish regularly on life writing and have written Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation and Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. My latest book, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Market, analyzes women’s authorship within the contexts of 19th-century publishing.  A new project includes articles (and eventually a book) on the debut volumes of British poets from Alfred Tennyson to Alice Meynell, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy. I edit the Norton Reader, a collection of classic and contemporary essays, and teach English 120, an introductory course in the modern essay.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Victorian Market.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 

--The Autobiography of Harriet Martineau, with introduction, annotations, and historical appendices.  Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2007.

--The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, editor. In The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006

--Traditions of Victorian Women's Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999, 2001

--"Christina Rossetti," in The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Pp. 422-38.

-- "Writing Nature at the Fin de Siècle: Grant Allen, Alice Meynell, and the Split Legacy of Gilbert White," Victorian Review, 30:2 (Fall 2010), 80-91.

  --"Harriet Martineau, Woman of Letters," in Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire, ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Cora Kaplan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).  Pp. 15-37.

--“Tennyson and the Ladies.” Special issue on Tennyson at Two Hundred, ed. Herbert F. Tucker. Victorian Poetry, 47 (Spring 2009), 25-43.

--“Triangulation, Desire, and Discontent in The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 47 (Autumn 2007), 901-20.

--"Alice Meynell’s Preludes (1875): Preludes to What Future of Poetry?” Victorian Literature and Culture, 34 (2006), 405-26

--"From French Revolution to English Reform: Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, and the ‘Little Book,’” Nineteenth Century Literature, 60 (2006), 409-50

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Major English Poets, Nature Writing in Britain and the Colonies, The English Bildungsroman, and the Brontës

GRADUATE COURSES: Victorian Poetry, Late Victorian Literature, and 19th-century Life Writing