Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers
About this audiobook
As these eleven dark and wild stories demonstrate, fairy tales by Victorian women constitute a distinct literary tradition, one startlingly subversive of the society that fostered it. From Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s adaptations of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” to Christina Rossetti’s unsettling antifantasies in Speaking Likenesses, these are breathtaking acts of imaginative freedom, by turns amusing, charming, and disturbing. Besides their social and historical implications, they are extraordinary stories, full of strange delights for readers of any age.
“Forbidden Journeys is not only a darkly entertaining book to read for the fantasies and anti-fantasies told, but also is a significant contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, and especially feminist studies.”—United Press International
”A service to feminists, to Victorian Studies, to children’s literature and to children.”—Beverly Lyon Clark, Women’s Review of Books
”These are stories to laugh over, cheer at, celebrate, and wince at. . . . Forbidden Journeys is a welcome reminder that rebellion was still possible, and the editors’ intelligent and fascinating commentary reveals ways in which these stories defied the Victorian patriarchy.”—Allyson F. McGill, Belles Lettres
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About the author
Nina Auerbach (1943-2017) was the John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. Though her area of academic concentration was in Victorian literature, she also ranged through cultural history, horror fiction, and film.
U. C. Knoepflmacher is the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature, Emeritus and Professor of English, Emeritus at Princeton University
